Posts Tagged: "opposition"

The Trademark Trial and Appeal Board (TTAB) has recently issued a decision allowing an opposition proceeding to continue after finding that opposer AT&T Mobility had standing to bring the proceeding to the TTAB. Applicants Mark Thomann and Dormitus Brands had argued that AT&T Mobility did not have standing to oppose applications to register “CINGULAR” trademarks because the opposer abandoned its own marks when it changed its business name more than a decade earlier. Although AT&T Mobility has demonstrated to the TTAB its basic ability to bring claims in the opposition proceeding, Eric Perrott, trademark and copyright attorney with Gerben Law Firm, notes that the low threshold AT&T Mobility has cleared doesn’t mean that the entity will be successful on its claims.

In early 2019, we undertook a comprehensive research project to develop a forensic understanding of European Patent Office (EPO) oppositions, particularly in the life sciences sector, analyzing EPO opposition data in far greater depth than in any publicly available report. We examined more than 5,000 opposition cases filed at the EPO over the last 10 years and studied the timelines for hundreds of life sciences oppositions. The resulting report, entitled EPO Opposition Trends in the Life Sciences Sector, offers a granular understanding of the EPO opposition procedure and its various nuances. Introduced in July 2016, the EPO’s streamlining initiative was designed to simplify opposition proceedings and deliver decisions more quickly, thus providing “early certainty”. The EPO’s target pendency is 15 months by 2020 (opposition pendency here being measured from expiry of the nine-months-from-grant period for filing an opposition to the Opposition Division issuing its decision). Our research revealed that the streamlining initiative is on track to meet its target in the life sciences sector. The mean opposition pendency has been reduced from just over 22 months in 2015 (pre-streamlining) to 17 months in 2018 (post-streamlining).