Many readers, particularly those based on one of the islands to the Northwest of the Canal de La Manche, will remember the famous metaphor used by then Justice Robin Jacob in his Decision of 23 October de 2001 (paroxetine): “The defendants could, so soon as they settled upon the product they were intending to sell,…

The Dutch company Philips is among the top-10 Patent Cooperation Treaty (PCT) applicants and the top-3 European Patent Convention (EPC) applicants. Owning about 64,000 patents and filing approximately 1,500 patent applications each year (with a strong focus on the growth areas of health and well-being), much is at stake for the company with the introduction…

A decision from Mr Justice Birss in Adaptive Spectrum And Signal Alignment Inc v British Telecommunications Plc [2014] EWHC 4194 has introduced additional complications for parties found to infringe a patent who then seek to work around the same. In essence that party cannot simply sit back and assume that the only feature to address…

As posted here the Swiss Federal Patent Court had to amend its Guidelines on Independence after the Swiss Federal Supreme Court had lifted a decision of the Federal Patent Court concerning the recusal of one of its non-permanent judges on 27 August 2013 in a case concerning the Nespresso coffee capsules. The revised Guidelines on…

Thanks to Miquel Montaña’s brilliant Christmas post, we have learnt a lot about the lucina sine (aut cum) concubitu and the legal impact her involvement may have had for the application of Directive 98/44/EC to the event leading to the holidays that we have just been celebrating. While I must admit that even after having…

On 18 December 2014, the Court of Justice of the European Union (“CJEU”) published a landmark judgment in Case C-364/13 International Stem Cell Corporation v. Comptroller General of Patents, in which it gave the following reply to a question referred by the High Court of Justice, Chancery Division (Patents Court), of England and Wales regarding…

Last week, we reported on the challenging endeavour to set up Patent Translate, the machine translation system which is under joint development by the European Patent Organisation (EPO) and Google and which is a crucial element of the Unitary Patent (UP) package. Intellectual Property Office (IPO) officials from Hungary, Finland and the Czech Republic told…