The Hargreaves Review, or to refer to it by its official title, “A Review of Intellectual Property and Growth” by Professor Ian Hargreaves, was commissioned by the UK coalition government in 2010 to report on various issues pertaining to intellectual property with a particular focus on copyright, particularly in the online environment, as well as…
Who may bring an action for patent revocation? Such is the fundamental question which has been submitted to the Tribunal de Grande Instance of Paris in a case whose factual circumstances made it very interesting. On 13 September 2010, Omnipharm Limited served a summons on Merial to appear before the Tribunal de Grande Instance of Paris to…
On 26 April 2011, the Supreme Court handed down an interesting decision en banc declaring that a Judge who had confirmed the validity of a patent while sitting on a Court of Appeal is not prevented from reconsidering the validity of the same patent while sitting on the Supreme Court. Ratiopharm had requested the removal…
By decision of 14 January 2011, the Court of Turin tackled the issue of the patentability of the intermediate, i.e. the chemical product which represents an obligatory passage of the process of synthesis and the structure of which is successively modified to obtain the wanted substance. The case involved Bayer Schering Pharma against Industriale Chimica…
Imagine: Wouldn’t it be fantastic to have one single patent which you could apply for at the WPO, the World Patent Office? A World Patent, which would be valid worldwide and which could be enforced in each single country of the world with worldwide effect? Decisions of the national local chambers of the World Patent…
In a very recently published decision of 4 March 2011 the Swiss Federal Supreme Court dealt with the decision of the Enlarged Board of Appeal 2/08 and approved a dosage regime for a pharmaceutical product as patentable subject matter of a Swiss type claim under the EPC 1973. According to the Supreme Court such claim…
The Court, in infringement proceedings brought by Novartis against Actavis for marketing generic Valsartan, held that the assessment of infringement had to be made as of the time of infringement, not as of the priority date. This is the first decision in years in Norway taking a position on this issue. The judgement also deals…
The Court of Appeal overturned a decision of the High Court and held that the act of replacing Shutz’s bottles in Shutz’s outer protective cages with Werit’s bottles constituted ’ making’ products protected by Shutz’s patent, which encompassed both the bottle and the cage. Click here for the full text of this case. A full summary…
In the recent case of Merck v Teva (decision of 8 April [2011] EWCA Civ 382), the English Court of Appeal confirmed that when considering the question of inventive step in light of prior art, it did not matter that the prior art was published only a few days before the priority date of a…
In countries where Judges are not trained in the technical field of the invention, they need experts to help them understand the factual aspects of the case. According to Spanish law, these experts may be appointed by the parties or by the Court, upon request by either of the parties. By law, there are circumstances…
