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…

The Supplementary Protection Certificate (“SPC”) seas have been relatively calm after the turmoil caused by “Super Thursday” (i.e. 12 December 2013), when shortly before packing for Christmas the Court of Justice of the European Union (“CJEU”) published three judgments on SPCs in a row. However, over the last few months there have been recent developments,…

by Miriam Büttner In a recent decision the European Court of Justice (ECJ) ruled on the maximum period of exclusivity of a patent and a supplementary protection certificate (SPC) (Order of the Court dated 13 February 2014 – case no C-555/13, Merck Canada Inc. vs. Accord Healthcare Ltd and others). Background: Merck Canada Inc. (Merck)…

The messy case law from the Court of Justice of the European Union (“CJEU”) on supplementary protection certificates (“SPC”) that protect “combinations” of pharmaceutical products has left many patentees that relied in good faith on the criteria laid down by the CJEU in the judgment of 16 September 1999, Case C-392/97 (“Farmitalia”) with patents whose…

As my colleague Rik Lambers, from Brinkhof, reported in the blog he posted last Thursday (12 December 2013), that day was a big day for Supplementary Protection Certificate (“SPC“) aficionados, since the European Court of Justice (“ECJ“) published three new judgments that will further feed the long-running saga of SPC decisions. Readers will no doubt…

SPC judgments galore in Luxembourg this morning. The Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) provided its judgments in the Eli Lilly case (C‑493/12), in the Actavis case (C‑443/12), and in the Georgetown case (C‑484/12). The CJEU’s Medeva judgment (case C-322/10), and AG Trstenjak’s opinion in that case, raised burning questions on the interpretation…