Insights

On 17 February 2026, the UPC Court of Appeal in bioMérieux v Labrador Diagnostics refused to stay a revocation appeal because of parallel EPO opposition proceedings, and also refused to extend the deadline for the statement of grounds while waiting for the EPO oral hearing. The signal is straightforward: the mere fact that the same European patent is being contested before both the UPC and the EPO does not automatically trigger a “wait for Munich” logic. A stay remains discretionary, and the court is looking at the concrete balance of interests rather than at parallel opposition as a standalone fact.

This matters well beyond the revocation appeal itself. For parties preparing infringement claims, validity defences or even a preliminary injunction during the overlap period, the procedural calendar is being reset. The UPC is showing little appetite to yield its timetable to the EPO, while the EPO has made its own acceleration practice in parallel court cases far more operational in public guidance. The dual-track system is still there, but the room for passive waiting is shrinking.

UKIPO’s updated April 2026 guidance on non-use revocation, read together with a growing line of Tribunal decisions, is making life harder for proprietors trying to defend registrations with thin evidence. Formally, the latest trade mark-related entry in the published Tribunal Practice Notice list is still TPN 1/2024 from July 2024. In practice, however, the evidential line on genuine use has become more exacting. Platform screenshots, scattered sales records and transaction traces that do not land clearly on UK consumers are becoming much less persuasive when standing on their own.

This matters particularly for cross-border e-commerce businesses. Many proprietors have grown used to relying on Amazon pages, marketplace dashboards, app-store listings or website snapshots to show that a mark was “on the market.” The harder question now is not whether the mark appeared online, but whether the evidence forms a credible commercial story: who bought, where they were, what was sold, how long the activity lasted, whether the UK market was genuinely being targeted, and whether the scale and frequency of sales make commercial sense. Once that chain breaks, the material begins to look less like genuine use and more like symbolic record-making.

Debate is intensifying across European patent practice over a practical question that used to sound theoretical: what happens when generative AI starts mass-producing technical disclosures that are later cited against fresh filings? What can be verified publicly is not a newly published EPO rule aimed specifically at “synthetic prior art”, but the continued force of a familiar one in the 2026 EPO Guidelines: a prior-art document must give the skilled person enough information to carry out the relevant technical teaching. A polished text is not enough on its own.

That point matters much more once AI systems can generate vast numbers of seemingly plausible combinations, formulations and molecular proposals at industrial scale. In chemistry, materials and life-science cases, the pressure created by a large machine-generated disclosure can be real. But if the cited document lacks a reproducible route, key conditions, credible data or any serious experimental footing, applicants still have room to shift the argument away from surface overlap and back to a harder question: does this document actually enable what it seems to disclose?

On 1 July 2026, EUIPO moves into phase two of the EU design reform. The practical headline for applicants is simple: a single design may be represented by one 3D object file or one animated object, rather than being forced back into a small set of static views. For product teams working with complex surfaces, digital interfaces, components or textured forms, that changes more than filing aesthetics. It changes how design intent is carried into the application itself.

What it does not yet justify is the market shorthand that EUIPO and WIPO’s Hague system are now fully linked for frictionless 3D transmission. Publicly available materials point in a more careful direction. WIPO Standard ST.92 now covers the electronic exchange of industrial design priority documents and allows 3D files to be included in the package, but EUIPO has also publicly indicated that applicants who expect to rely on a filing as a priority source may still consider static representations after 1 July 2026. Just as important, the Hague System does not require a “basic application” in the Madrid sense. The real issues are priority-document handling, consistency of representation and how different offices and platforms will read the material in practice.

Under the Digital Services Act, trusted flaggers were already supposed to enjoy priority treatment when they submit notices of illegal content. What is changing now is more operational. With sandbox testing of a copyright infringement notice API toolkit being opened to the first certified trusted flaggers with support from the EUIPO Observatory and the European Commission, some large-scale right holders and their agents are starting to move away from the fragmented webforms of individual platforms and toward a structured route into platform enforcement systems.

That sounds like a technical upgrade, but it is really a redesign of the entry point into copyright enforcement online. Whoever can deliver notices faster, in cleaner data formats and at sustained volume will gain a practical advantage the old complaint interfaces could never offer. For media groups and anti-piracy teams that spend their days chasing mirror sites, repost networks and repeated uploads across multiple services, this may be the closest thing in years to a system-level enforcement tool. For platforms, it also means the burden of accuracy, explainability and redress will become harder to postpone.

The market reaction to the Japan Patent Office’s mid-2026 revision of its AI-related invention guidance should not stop at the headline that MLLMs and cross-modal generative AI are now being treated more explicitly. The practical shift is deeper. For applicants, the revision changes how the specification should be written, where the technical contribution needs to be located, and how inventive-step and description arguments are likely to be tested in prosecution.

The direction is not surprising. JPO had already added 10 new AI-related examination cases in 2024, and its March 2026 report on AI-related invention trends widened the lens to generative AI, multimodal AI and prompt engineering. Read together, the message is fairly clear: Japanese examination practice is moving away from being impressed by the mere presence of a large model and toward asking what concrete technical problem the cross-modal system actually solves.