On June 17, 2022, WTO members adopted a waiver to the WTO Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) allowing suspension of patent related to the Covid-19 pandemic, which is the result of a year and a half of intense debate. Already there is a lot of alarm in the industry about this…

Normal service looks to have been resumed following the Court of Appeal judgment in IPCom v Vodafone [2021] EWCA Civ 205, in which Arnold LJ reversed a first instance finding by Recorder Douglas Campbell QC that Vodafone was entitled to a defence of Crown use in respect of certain acts which infringed an IPCom patent,…

As Bob Hudec explained in his legendary The GATT Legal System and World Trade Diplomacy, GATT’s (since 1995, WTO) long-standing practice of seeking to adopt decisions by consensus finds its roots in 1947, when the then 23 parties to GATT were a small club of good friends. The proposition that a friend might impose a…

The fundamental question which types of products are amenable to SPC protection and which types of marketing authorizations allow the filing of SPCs has aroused much controversy in Europe, and reached a climax when the CJEU in its judgment Boston Scientific (C-527/17) of 25 October 2018 denied the grant of SPCs on the basis of…

Since the Eli Lilly v. Canada award of 2017, the relevance of international investment law for patents has been known to a wider public. In response to the revocation of two Canadian patents concerning the compounds olanzapine and atomoxetine by Canadian courts, the US pharmaceutical company Eli Lilly initiated arbitral proceedings against Canada on the…

When a company is not prepared to charge a socially acceptable price in the Netherlands for a medicine, the government should use other instruments such as compulsory licences, encouraging pharmacy preparation and allowing patients to order medicinal products abroad in order to ensure that the medicine is available for patients. The Dutch Council for Public…

Under the auspices of the Max Planck Institute for Innovation and Competition (Munich) 40 researchers from 25 countries passed a “Declaration on Patent Protection”. This declaration was published in connection with the 20th anniversary of the TRIPs Agreement. The authors of the declaration state that over the past decades, the autonomy of nation states to…