In the oral proceedings held in the EPO appeal case T 1760/11 the Board of Appeal (BoA) 3.3.01 selected one single closest prior art (CPA) document for the inventive step assessment and then denied the opponents the opportunity to present inventive step attacks starting from other CPAs. Petitions for review under Article 112a EPC were…

The Higher Regional Court Düsseldorf has ruled in its decision of 20 March 2014 (docket number 12 W 8.14) that an explicit allegation of entitlement to a national part of a European patent, e.g. by sending a warning letter or the filing of a court action, does not include an implicit allegation of entitlement (stillschweigende…

1 Introduction Reports that say there’s — that something hasn’t happened are always interesting to me, because as we know, there are known knowns; there are things that we know that we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But…

Suppose you have an invention that resides in using a known substance in a known dosage for a known purpose, and your only distinguishing feature is that you apply a particular therapeutic measure after the administration of your substance. Can such a post-administration therapeutic measure, which is in essence a method of treatment, establish patentability…

The European Commission has adopted new competition rules for the assessment of technology-transfer agreements. The revised Block Exemption Regulation for Technology-Transfer Agreements (EU) 316/2014 (“TTBER”), and the accompanying Guidelines (OJ, 2014/C 89/03) entered into force on May 1, 2014. The general structure and most of the provisions have in substance remained unchanged compared to the…

In its recent decision “Communication Channel” (“Kommunikationskanal”) of 11 February 2014, docket, X ZR 107/12, the FCJ decided that the priority of an earlier application may be claimed if the technical instructions described there by means of an example or in other ways appear for the skilled person as an embodiment of the more general…

In decision T 373/12 of 2 April 2014 the Enlarged Board has been asked to decide on the extent to which the clarity of claims amended during opposition proceedings and opposition appeal proceedings can be challenged when the amendments are based on dependent claims as granted.

a) The applicant is not obliged to limit the protective scope to explicitly described embodiments, but may make certain generalisations to cover the entire invention. b) Whether a claim containing generalisations is enabled depends on whether the protective scope extends beyond the most generalized teaching solving the underlying problem. c) Functionally describing a group of…

In our previous blog Opting out and Opting in we discussed some of the questions regarding the transitional regime under the Unified Patent Court Agreement (UPCA). Due to its importance and ambiguity this provision continues to be a source of considerable controversy, so much so that the Preparatory Committee, which is tasked with preparing the…