Along with a number of other relevant innovations to the Italian IP Code, last August the Italian legislator eventually passed the long awaited implementation into Italian law of Directive 44/1998/EC on biotechnological inventions (see legislative decree no. 131/2010 of 13 August 2010 here). Those who are familiar with the Italian political scene will know that…
By Legislative Decree no. 131 of 13 August 2010, which became effective on 2 September 2010, the Italian legislator passed a number of amendments to the Italian IP Code. One of these is new Art. 68 (1bis) on the statutory limitations to patent rights (which in paragraph 1 already included, and still includes, personal use,…
By decision of 29 July 2010, the Italian Supreme Administrative Court (Consiglio di Stato) tackled the difficult issue of whether the Italian drugs regulatory authority (Agenzia Italiana del Farmaco – AIFA) should or should not consider the existence of a patent when adopting decisions relating to the marketing authorisations of generics. In the case at…
By decision of 9 June 2010, the Italian Supreme Court tackled the issue of patent exhaustion in a manner which may give rise to some debate. The case concerned a claim of infringement brought by Bavelloni, an Italian manufacturer of machines for glass processing, against competitor Bottero which had exhibited in a trade fair a…
By Legislative Decree no. 28 of 4 March 2010, the Italian legislator introduced obligatory mediation into the Italian legal system. In particular, Art. 5 provides that, as of 20 March 2011, in a number of listed cases, court proceedings may be instigated only if, prior to that, the parties pursued mediation proceedings using one of…
By a decision of 20 May 2009, the Italian Supreme Court clarified the limits of the so called pharmacy exception contemplated by Italian patent law, according to which the extemporaneous preparation by the pharmacist of units of a drug, based on a medical prescription, using a patented active substance, does not result in patent infringement….
In a case involving the US multinational Mars and an Italian producer of rice (Riseria Monferrato), the Court of Appeal of Turin, by decision of 19 November 2008, tackled – one of the few cases in Italian case law – the interesting issue of the difference between discoveries and inventions and their patentability. The case…
The Court of Appeal of Milan established a principle whereby named inventors must be called in revocation actions and, if they are not, proceedings may not reach the stage of decision. This principle, which may sound strange to practitioners of other jurisdictions, is based on Art. 122, paragraph 4, of the Italian IP Code, according…
By decision no. 9291 of 19 April 2010, the Italian Supreme Court clarified that the sale of a single unit of the patented product is novelty destroying under Art. 46 of the Italian IP Code, which provides that an invention is new if it is not comprised in the state of art and that this…
Two recent decisions of the Italian Supreme Court (no. 21835 of 14 October 2009 and no. 23414 of 4 November 2009) have tackled the issue of sufficiency in a peculiar manner, departing from previous case law. In both decisions, it is stated that “the protection granted by a patent presupposes, besides the requirements of novelty…
