by Dominic Adair Day 2 of AIPPI’s 2015 Global Congress in Rio brought with it the Pharma Sessions: trade marks, personalised medicine and two sessions with a local flavour – technology transfer under the Brazilian Government’s PDP programme (promoting local laboratories) and whether the practice of Brazil’s regulatory authority (ANVISA) to challenge patents prior to…

Secessionist pressure grows in Catalonia, after regional elections on 27 September 2015 (qualified as an informal referendum on independence) were won by supporters of an independent Catalonia. In Scotland supporters of independence have been far from silenced since they lost a referendum on the same issue last year. Kluwer IP Law found the following article…

Article 118 of the EPC (entitled “Unity of the European patent application or European patent”) states that: “[…] the text of the application or patent shall be uniform for all designated Contracting States, unless this Convention provides otherwise.” Like other Articles such as Article 2.2, 14.3, 43.1, 130.1 or 148.1, Article 118 follows the logic…

On 3 June 2015, the High Court of Justice (“Tribunal Superior de Justicia”) of Madrid handed down a judgment which has alerted everyone of the need to have robust systems in place to make sure that a deadline for paying renewal fees is not missed. The facts of the case may be briefly summarised as…

One of the issues which will be discussed at the next annual meeting of AIPPI, due to take place in Rio de Janeiro in October 2015, is Q244, entitled “Inventorship of multinational inventions.” In today’s world, it is becoming increasingly frequent for inventions to be the outcome of teamwork conducted by persons from different jurisdictions….

Technological innovation has left deep footprints on the evolution of International Law. In the mid-1960s, in his course at The Hague Academy of International Law, professor Mouton explained that every time inventors conceived a revolutionary invention, politicians had to devise an international organization to take care of it. A classic example is the establishment of…

Spain will not change its mind and join the Unitary Patent package, now that the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) has dismissed its legal challenges of the patent package, laid out in the EU Regulations 1257/2012 and 1260/2012 and the UPC Agreement. This is the expectation of the Confederation of Employers and…

The legendary deficient regulation of supplementary protection certificates (“SPCs”) has caused the Spanish Patent and Trademark Office (the “SPTO”) and Spanish Courts to struggle as to whether or not the “restitutio in integrum” procedure available to patents is also applicable to SPCs. The High Court of Justice of Madrid, in a recent Judgment of 22…