Patents
Australia Abolished the Innovation Patent in 2021. New Ones Are Still Being Filed — and the Law Fixes the Last Day Any Can Exist: 25 August 2029.
Parliament closed the country's second-tier patent system with a single sentence — a test on 'the date of the patent' — and wrote no express wind-down provision. That test left the ordinary divisional route open. 508 applications have come through it since abolition, 137 of the rights they produced were enforceable at the register's late-July 2026 extract, and one drugmaker's patents from a single nine-member family were fought over in two Federal Court proceedings with a biosimilar rival — one brought against it, one brought by it. Costs went against the drugmaker in both, all nine patents are dead, and every right the system can still produce is gone by 25 August 2029.
Read the investigation