The dust hasn’t settled on the recent substantial changes to the Australian Patents Act (the ‘Raising The Bar’ amendments) and yet more changes are now proposed.
IP Australia, the government agency responsible for administering intellectual property rights and legislation relating to patents, trade marks, designs and plant breeder’s rights, has released a consultation paper.
The proposed amendments are to introduce (i) an ‘objects’ clause to clarify the interaction between the patent system and competition policy; and (ii) an explicit exclusion from patentability for inventions that would be offensive to ‘an ordinary reasonable and fully informed member of the Australian public’.
The purpose of the objects clause (for which two options are proposed) is to clearly state the underlying purpose of the Patents Act so as to avoid ambiguity or uncertainty. Perhaps the Raising The Bar amendments would have been an appropriate time to make amendments to avoid ambiguity or uncertainty?
The proposed patentability exclusion is similar to the protection of ordre public or morality in other jurisdictions, such as the European Union, Japan and New Zealand.
The deadline for submission on the proposed amendments is 27 September 2013.