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United Kingdom Intellectual Property Office Decisions |
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You are here: BAILII >> Databases >> United Kingdom Intellectual Property Office Decisions >> Bernard Edgar Anning (Patent) [2006] UKIntelP o37406 (27 December 2006) URL: http://www.bailii.org/uk/cases/UKIntelP/2006/o37406.html Cite as: [2006] UKIntelP o37406 |
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For the whole decision click here: o37406
Summary
Reinstatement was sought after the application had been treated as refused for failure to reply to an examination report. The attorneys acting for the applicant believed that he had abandoned the application and had not therefore passed on to him the Office’s usual warning of refusal; however the applicant maintained in his evidence that in the light of discouraging examination reports on this application and a corresponding international application his intention was to leave the application dormant until he had done further work on the invention, although he accepted that he had been labouring under a misapprehension. The mistake only came to light when he approached the attorneys to discuss what might still be protected and became aware that he should have filed amendments to keep the application alive.
The hearing officer held that, although there had been a continuing underlying intention to keep the UK application in being , the applicant had still not intended to reply to the examination report (albeit for mistaken reasons). On the plain meaning of the term, the failure to reply was not therefore “unintentional” as required by section 20A(2)(c). Following the reasoning in Sirna Therapeutics Inc (BL O/240/05) on late declarations of priority under section 5(2B), the hearing officer considered that the “unintentional” test was not the same as the “continuing underlying intention” test applied to discretionary requests for extensions of time under rule 110(4).
