At-a-glance:
Norwegian Industrial Property Office
PO Box 8160 Dep, 0033 Oslo
Street address: Sandakerveien 64, 0484 Oslo
Tel: +47 22 38 73 00, Fax: +47 22 38 73 01
Email: mail@patentstyret.no
Website: www.patentstyret.no
The Norwegian government...
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At-a-glance:
Norwegian Industrial Property Office
PO Box 8160 Dep, 0033 Oslo
Street address: Sandakerveien 64, 0484 Oslo
Tel: +47 22 38 73 00,
Fax: +47 22 38 73 01
Email: mail@patentstyret.no
Website: www.patentstyret.no
The Norwegian government has been closely watching the falling number of national patent and trade mark filings in recent years, and will release a paper soon on how it plans to encourage domestic companies to file nationally.
As the fifth largest oil exporter in the world and the third largest gas exporter, the energy industry produces a lot of IP work. "Oil and gas is about 50-70% of the work and while there's been an increase in fish farming, there isn't much IP to protect there," says one partner.
Of course, Norway has not ratified the London Agreement and is not a member of the EU, so is not immediately affected by the unitary patent. But having relatively recently acceded to the European Patent Convention (EPC), validation work is going strong. "The number of validations has gone up and this is a big change," one practitioner says. "The number of patent applications has been slow for a while but validations have gone up."
Patent litigation has been consistent, with a number of high-profile pharmaceutical cases keeping practitioners busy. Similarly, trade mark litigation has been "business as usual" and in one interesting case, the Supreme Court dismissed Trumf's appeal in late June 2012. The Tripp Trapp case between Stokke and Trumf raised issues related to the infringement of trade mark and copyright in respect to the marketing and sales of high chairs. Also, as Norway is increasingly being seen as a gateway to Europe for counterfeit goods, practitioners report an uptick in anti-counterfeiting work.
The Norwegian patent office (NIPO) has been active in forming bilateral agreements in the form of patent prosecution highways (PPH). In fact, after a trial period that ended in October, the PPH with the United States was extended indefinitely.
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