A New Kind of Justice? In the often adversarial landscape of European patent litigation, the Unified Patent Court (UPC) has introduced a lesser-known, but potentially transformative institution: the Patent Mediation and Arbitration Centre (PMAC). Split between Lisbon and Ljubljana, the PMAC quietly proposes an alternative vision for dispute resolution—one that trades force for dialogue, and…
In 1976, Tom Scholz—a MIT-trained engineer and sonic perfectionist—spent months layering guitar tracks in the basement of his Boston apartment to produce More Than a Feeling, a song whose depth came not from its melody, but from its structure. The track was not written; it was architected. Nearly five decades later, the biotech and pharmaceutical…
The use of divisional patent applications in order to ensure flexibility and to keep a patentee’s options open as to the protection it seeks to obtain is established practice in many patent offices around the world. The use of divisionals is particularly common in the pharmaceutical field, where the exact form of an authorized medicine…
This article follows the jurisdictional analysis initiated in Legal Inception: Harmonizing the UPC and National Courts through EU Law. That piece focused on procedural structure. This one turns to the interpretive culture required to make that structure coherent. The European patent system is no longer defined by its fragmentation—it is now defined by how that…
G 1/24 has now been issued, and concludes “The description and any drawings are always referred to when interpreting the claims, and not just in the case of unclarity or ambiguity.” With this simple proclamation, the Enlarged Board of Appeal (EBA) provides clear guidance on the fundamental issue of claim interpretation which has caused much…
Maybe not all readers of this blog will know that there once was a “North German Confederation” which existed from July 1867 to December 1870, after which it became part of the newly to-be-founded German kingdom. This confederation even had its own constitution, which became somewhat of a blueprint for the German constitution of 1871….
Diving into the labyrinth of intertwined dreams in Christopher Nolan’s Inception—where each dream level operates under its own rules while influencing the others—sharply illuminates the intricate structure of the European patent litigation system. Within this evolving landscape, patent holders are granted procedural freedom: during the transitional phase of the Unified Patent Court (UPC), they may…
As James Bond’s 1989 adventure Licence to Kill, in which a special permit confers extraordinary authority upon its bearer, Brexit has furnished British patentees with a renewed licence to navigate Europe’s patent landscape under distinct rules. While the European Patent Convention (EPC) remains intact—Britain never exited that treaty—patentees domiciled in the UK now confront separate validation…
This year, at the Annual Fordham IP Law & Policy Conference, we heard Lord Justice Birss reflect on how we are living through a transformative era in intellectual property (IP) law. In the age of artificial intelligence (AI), some voices have gone so far as to call for the abolition of IP rights altogether. Yet,…
Defining antibodies by functional features is not always straightforward at the EPO. T326/22 is a nice example of how this can be achieved. To briefly recap the standard EPO approach, an antibody may generally be claimed by reference to its epitope, i.e. the structurally defined part of the antigen that it specifically binds to…
