In a Judgment dated 26 July 2018, the influential Barcelona Court of Appeal (Section 15) rejected an overly narrow, “literalistic” interpretation of a patent claim. A claim’s terms must be interpreted according to the meaning that a person skilled in the art would give them – even if it is not the most scientifically “puristic”…
Over the last few years, highly detailed discussions on patent validity have been a staple of Spanish preliminary injunction proceedings. The influential Barcelona Court of Appeal now clarifies that, while validity may be discussed, the analysis should not reach the same level of depth as in the main proceedings. Furthermore, a defendant wishing to object…
Barcelona Commercial Court no. 5 handed down a judgment quashing the claimant’s DNI action without ruling on the merits of (non-)infringement. The Court found that the claimant had standing to file the DNI. However, one of the procedural pre-requisites for a DNI action had not been met: the claimant was neither industrially exploiting any actual…
The influential Barcelona Court of Appeal corrected a finding of the Barcelona Patents Court, which – to great surprise – had lifted an injunction on finding that Swiss-type claims were affected by the Spanish Reservation to the European Patent Convention, and thereby ineffective in Spain. Although this decision arrived only after SPC expiry and thus…
In injunction proceedings decided in just a few hours (likely a record in Spanish patent litigation) in the context of the 2018 Mobile World Congress, Barcelona Commercial Court no. 4 granted a preliminary injunction. However, it also allowed the infringer to lift the injunction by providing a “counter-guarantee”. Thus far a very exceptional occurrence, this…
In a judgment in a low-key dispute concerning the infringement of a utility model, the Barcelona Court of Appeal (Spain’s most influential patents court) held that the scope of protection of a two-part claim was determined by its characterising portion, and not by the preamble portion. This finding, which should apply to patents as well,…
In preliminary injunction proceedings, the influential Barcelona Court of Appeal held that reasons of “congruence” bind the court to basing the assessment of inventive step strictly on the particular prior art document chosen as the closest prior art by the party challenging its validity, regardless of whether that choice is technically and objectively justified. This…
A Spanish patents court rules for the first time on the sometimes blurry line dividing “discoveries” and “inventions”. The Court found that a method for prenatal diagnosis based on the discovery that sufficient fetal DNA can also be detected in maternal serum or plasma is a non-patentable discovery, because it lacks any “additional technical teaching”…
In a long-awaited judgment, the Spanish Supreme Court has clarified the application of the TRIPS agreement to patent applications affected by the Spanish reservation to the EPC: Article 70.7 of TRIPS allowed owners of patent applications filed before 7 October 1992, but which were still pending when TRIPS came into force, to amend the patents…
In a lengthy obiter dicta, the Barcelona Court of Appeal seems to depart from a longstanding assumption of Spanish law: that the mere continuance of the infringement (i.e. the presence of the infringing goods on the market) is per se enough to justify the urgent interest in the grant of a preliminary injunction. Rather, an…
