The Italian Supreme Court recently (and surprisingly) said that inventors must be named as co-defendants in revocation actions. In 2010 I wrote a post concerning the requirement to name inventors as co-defendants in Italian revocation actions. I reported that the Court of Appeal of Milan had established a principle whereby named inventors had to be called…

As the readers will know, on 18 November 2014, Advocate General Yves Bot published his conclusions in cases C-146/13 and C-147/13, whereby he has proposed that the Court of Justice of the European Union (“CJEU”) reject the nullity actions filed by the Kingdom of Spain against Regulation (EU) 1257/2012 (Enhanced cooperation) and 1260/2012 (Translation arrangements)…

Literature and litigation go hand in hand. My fellow contributors aptly illustrated this, their recent posts moving to the cadence of the language of Shakespeare and Montesquieu. To follow their footsteps, but on a more contemporary note on a future (some suggest: fantasy) subject: “Brace yourselves, Winter is coming.” Well, Winter is not coming. At…

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)…

We have previously reported (post 28 August 2012) on ongoing litigation in Denmark between DuPont/Danisco and Novozymes resulting at the time in the grant of an interlocutory injunction being firstly granted and then revoked as the patent-in-suit was subsequently invalidated. In a more recent development, DuPont/Danisco filed suit at the Maritime & Commercial Court (MCC)…

Regular readers of the Kluwer patent blog may recall that in April 2014, the English Patents Court revoked two patents relating to trastuzumab, the active ingredient in Herceptin, which is marketed outside of the US by Roche. One patent was for a dosage regimen and the other related to a composition of trastuzumab containing certain…

Although Brian Cordery will try to have you believe that the title of this blog is borrowed from William Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night, it may well have been taken from the Report from the Commission to the Council and the European Parliament dated 14 July 2005 on Development and implications of patent law in the field…