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Under U.S. patent laws, the 20-year term of a patent can be extended if the USPTO fails to meet certain timeliness benchmarks during the patent examination process. The statute provides for Patent Term Adjustment (PTA) equal to the number of days of USPTO delay, less the number of days of applicant delay. The statute defines…
The District Court The Hague finds that it is competent based on Article 7 Dutch Code of Civil Procedure (Article 6(1) Brussels I / Article 8(1) Brussels Ibis – plurality of defendants) even though the article’s preconditions are no longer met. A full summary of this case has been published on Kluwer IP Law.
In the aftermath of the CJEU decisions Eli Lilly/Medeva and Actavis/Georgetown II, the Swiss Federal Institute of Intellectual Property proposes changes in its SPC granting practice. One hot topic in connection with the granting of SPCs concerns the question on how to define whether a product is protected by a basic patent (Art. 3 (a)…
The Board of Appeal rejected an attempt to apply the fiction of novelty of “medical” substances and compositions of article 54(5) EPC to a dialysis membrane. Contrary to T2003/08 the claimed dialysis membrane did not contain any further substance that might constitute an active ingredient. With reference to arguments in T2003/08, the board noted that…
The behavior of EPO president Benoît Battistelli is bad for the reputation of the European Patent Office and may in the longer term force him to resign. Wouter Pors, IP practitioner of Bird & Bird, said this in an interview with Kluwer IP Law, on the occasion of a recent decision of the Dutch appeal…
About half a year ago I reported on new developments in German case law concerning the doctrine of equivalence (see http://kluwerpatentblog.com/2014/10/10/news-about-the-doctrine-of-equivalence-in-german-case-law/). Just at the beginning of this month my colleague Bernward posted about further developments (see http://kluwerpatentblog.com/2015/03/02/8966/). Now again, there is a recent decision of the German Bundesgerichtshof (Federal Court of Justice) dealing with the…
The Bulgarian Patent Office refused to issue a supplementary protection certificate for a medical product comprising three components as one of them was not within the scope of protection of the basic patent. The decision of the Patent Office was first annulled by the first instance court but subsequently upheld by the Bulgarian Supreme Administrative Court….
On 12 March 2015, the Court of Justice of the European Union (“CJEU”) published the judgment announced in our last blog in Case C-577/13, in response to some of the preliminary questions referred by the High Court of Justice (England and Wales), Chancery Division (Patents Court) in a case between Actavis Group EHF, Actavis UK…
Nine claims of a SynQor patent for a high efficiency power converter were anticipated by the combination of two prior art references that taught DC-to-DC power converters for pulsed loads, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit has ruled (Vicor Corp. v. SynQor, Inc., March 13, 2015, Clevenger, R.). Because the combined references…
A first review of the EPO’s proposals for the EP-UE renewal fees in comparison to the current rates by Thorsten Bausch and Greg Sach The EPO, or more specifically the president of the EPO, has recently submitted proposals for the level of renewal fees for the future European Patent with Unitary Effect (EP-UE) to the…
