Today, in the decision T 0489/14 the EPO’s Boards of Appeal published their referral of three questions relating to computer implemented simulations to the Enlarged Board of Appeal. Referrals to the EPO’s Enlarged Board of Appeal do not come around often, referrals in the area of computer technology even less so. The purpose of referrals…
One has to have a lot of courage to accept the task of coordinating a book on Supplementary Protection Certificates (“SPCs”). The immense variety of the facts discussed in the numerous cases that have historically sparked the need for preliminary questions to the Court of Justice of the European Union (“CJEU”) on the interpretation of…
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…
A few days ago, our Kluwer News Blogger reported on a decision in the Netherlands, holding two Dutch patents for processing the Ethiopian grain “teff” as null and void. While this decision certainly has a political dimension, which formed the focus of the reports in the general press and the report from the Norwegian Fridtjof…
The European Patent Office and representatives of the 38 Member States organised a meeting last week of the Committee on Patent Law to discuss next steps following decision T 1063/18 of an EPO Board of Appeal on plant patentability. Representatives of the European Commission were present as observer. In its landmark decision of 5 December 2018,…
The Federal Constitutional Court of Germany (BVerfG) intends to decide on the complaint against German ratification of the Unified Patent Court Agreement this year. The case (2 BvR 739/17) is on the 2019 decision list, which was published yesterday. It doesn’t come as a surprise. The UPCA case was on the 2018 list as well,…
A district court erred in granting summary judgment to the defending provider on the grounds that the asserted claims were invalid for lack of written description and were not infringed by the provider’s system. Case date: 14 February 2019 Case number: No. 17-2510 Court: United States Court of Appeals, Federal Circuit A full summary of this…
The introduction of an SPC manufacturing waiver in the European Union is now all but a done deal. Following the European Commission’s initial proposal for a regulation amending Regulation (EC) 469/2009 on SPCs for medicinal products (COM(2018) 317 final) issued on 28 May 2018, the European Parliament’s Committee on Legal Affairs (JURI) adopted its final…
If a patent only provides the skilled person with a general scientific explanation as to why the procedure disclosed therein is suitable for the purpose in question and does not disclose a new technical teaching in relation to this purpose, but merely a discovery of biological correlations, then this is insufficient to acknowledge novelty (continuation…
The Supreme People’s Court of China recently issued a new judicial interpretation regarding preliminary injunctions (PI) for intellectual property (IP) disputes that took effect on January 1, 2019, officially titled “Provisions of The Supreme People’s Court on Several Issues Concerning the Application of Laws in Adjudication of Action Preservation Cases Involving IP Disputes” (Provisions). The…
