In September of 2013 the Spanish Patent and Trademark Office (“SPTO”) published a draft Patents Act, which will hopefully be approved by Parliament within the next few months, assuming that the election calendar so permits. During the last year, the draft has received numerous comments from the stakeholders concerned, including the Spanish competition authorities and…
The English Patents Court (Birss J) recently demonstrated a somewhat unconventional approach to answering the statutory question of obviousness when assessing inventive step*. The judgment also provides some guidance on the role of commercial as opposed to technical considerations, in particular regulatory concerns, when assessing obviousness. Leo Pharma, the defendant in these proceedings, market a…
The training of judges for the UPC will commence in the first quarter of 2015. Willem Hoyng, member of the Expert Panel of the UPC Preparatory Committee, informed Kluwer IP Law that a group of 26 ET judges (Eligible with Training) has been selected for the initial training course. However, this does not mean that they will also be…
The juxtapositon of patent limitations in national nullity proceedings and before national patent offices on the one hand and according to article 105a EPC on the other hand is a hotly debated issue not only in Switzerland. In a recently published decision of 2 June 2014 (4A_541/2013), the Swiss Federal Supreme Court had to decide –…
The doctrine of equivalence has seen some kind of renaissance in German case law recently. In short words, there are three questions to be asked to decide for equivalent infringement if there is no literal infringement. The first one being the question about the effect of the different solution. Do the means used to solve…
The machine translations provided by Google and the European Patent Organization have to improve considerably before the Czech Republic will ratify the UPC agreement. Josef Kratochvil, president of the Czech IPO Office, told Kluwer UPC News reporter that the language issue is the most serious problem the Czechs have with the patent package. It is…
Before diving into this year’s Oktoberfest with the Munich IP community, colleague contributor Thorsten Bausch summarized the German Federal Court of Justice’s case law of Summer 2014. As the days of raising beer mugs and polka dancing come to an end in Munich, so does the Dutch Summer (finally). Time for an overview of what…
On 12 September 2014, the Barcelona Court of Appeal (Section 15) handed down a decision confirming a preliminary injunction preventing a Spanish company from marketing capsules claimed to be compatible with what is known as the Nespresso® system, which raises a handful of interesting legal points. The first point of interest discussed was whether or…
As already described in a previous blog entry the Belgian Supreme Court nullified a decision of the Antwerp Court of Appeal granting a descriptive seizure (“beschrijvend beslag”; “saisie-description”) on the presumption of validity of (European) patents. The written decision of the Supreme Court is now available (link). The Supreme Court has followed the advice of…
Will the upcoming Unified Patent Court be a success? Is opting-out most patents the best option when the new system starts functioning? How will IP litigators and practitioners see their work change? What are the economic consequences for participating countries? Are SME’s benefitting from the Unitary Patent as much as multinationals? Won’t it be too…
