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Office: Sheffield

John-Paul Rooney BEng, PhD, CPA, EPA, MIET

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John-Paul Rooney is a patent attorney in our Electronics, Computing & Physics group.

John-Paul has particular experience and expertise in the electronics and software fields. This includes mobile telecommunications devices, computing devices, signal coding, particularly video coding, autonomous vehicles, Internet of Things, lone worker systems, and instrumentation and measurement devices.

He leads our China Desk focussing our relationships with Chinese attorneys and businesses, and has delivered presentations on intellectual property law issues internationally for various organisations, including the UK Intellectual Property Office, UKTI, and the China-Britain Business Council. He has written for or contributed to articles in several national and international publications, including the Telegraph and the Guardian.

Education & background

John-Paul holds a PhD in Electronic and Electrical Engineering from the University of Leeds, and joined Withers & Rogers in 2003 in London after a spell in industry designing electrical distribution systems in hazardous areas. He rejoined us in 2011 to develop the Electronics, Computing and Physics group in the North of England after spending 5 years at another firm in Yorkshire. Unusually, John-Paul completed a trade apprenticeship in instrumentation and electrical engineering at AstraZeneca prior to joining the patent profession.

John-Paul has knowledge and experience of working with Digital Video Broadcasting (DVB) in the United Kingdom and in compatible territories overseas, such as in Europe, Australia and New Zealand and is familiar with telecommunications technology including coded orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (OFDM) modulation techniques from his PhD studies. John-Paul works with MPEG standards, such as MPEG-2 video, MPEG-4 Advanced Video Coding (AVC) commonly referred to a H.264, and MPEG-5 HEVC. John-Paul also works with non-MPEG technologies in video coding and broadcast.  In addition, John-Paul has successfully prosecuted many difficult graphical user interface (GUI) patents before the European Patent Office and has knowledge of aspects of various audio codecs (such as ALAC, Dolby TrueHD, DTS-HD, FLAC, MPEG-4 ALS, MLP, etc.).

On a personal note...

John-Paul loves cycling in the Peak District, is known to play 5-a-side football on Monday evenings, and more than the odd game of golf during the summer. John-Paul has two daughters and a son and enjoys swimming, camping and having adventures with them.