No doubt, one of the patentability requirements which is more difficult to examine is inventive step. Unlike other requirements, which call for a more objective analysis, inventive activity requires a subjective judgment, that is, whether the invention would have been obvious to a person skilled in the art. Taking into account that, inevitably, inventive activity…
Although the title of this blog will sound trite to many friends accustomed to arguing patent cases before the European Patent Office, it does not sound so trite when read against the background of Spanish case law. For years it was relatively rare for the Spanish Supreme Court to accept appeals in patent matters, which…
One of the difficulties that patent owners sometimes encounter when they are planning to apply for a preliminary injunction is the dearth of evidence. A decision handed down on 23 February 2017 by Barcelona Commercial Court No. 5 may shed some light on patent owners who need additional evidence to support an application for a…
On 24 November 2016, the Court of Appeal of Barcelona (Section 15) handed down a judgment in which it confirmed that “the interpretation of the scope of protection of a patent for the purposes of analysing its validity cannot be different from when its infringement is analysed”. The Judges also highlighted the relevance of the…
Most readers will be aware of the so-called “all elements” test, whereby patent infringement is normally discarded unless the allegedly infringing device or process reproduces each and every element of the claim. The “all elements” test contrasts with the so-called “essentiality” test. According to this test, there can still be infringement if an element of…
In the past decade, a new character of the patent theatre has made inroads into the case law of some EU Member States, “imported” from the so-called “EPO case law”. Its name is “plausibility”. The origin of the plausibility concept can be traced to Decision T 939/92 (AgrEvo), where the EPO’s Board of Appeals held…
Last Saturday (1 April 2017) the Spanish Official Gazette (“Boletín Oficial del Estado”) published Royal Decree 316/2017, dated 31 March, containing the Implementing Regulations of the Patents Act 24/2015, of 24 July. As readers will remember from previous blogs, the new Patents Act, which, among other aspects, introduced the compulsory examination of substantive patentability requirements,…
One of the objectives of the new Patents Act that is to come into force on 1 April 2017 is to prompt a higher level of specialization of Judges dealing with patent cases. In particular, article 118 assigns jurisdiction to hear patent cases to a sub-group of Courts within the general group of “Commercial Courts”…
The new Spanish Patent Act, which will come into force on 1 April 2017, will introduce a modernised “utility model” that is expected to become the natural alternative for “non-examined” patents, which the new law has put at bay. One of the most controversial provisions dealing with utility models is Article 137, which reads as…
On 25 January 2017, the CJEU handed down a very interesting judgment in case C-367/15, concluding that Article 13 of Directive EC 2004/48 (better known as “the Enforcement Directive”) does not prevent a national regulation from stating that when an intellectual property right (“IPR”) has been infringed, the IPR owner may claim an amount corresponding…
