Although the title of this blog may sound trite to most readers, it may still be of interest to briefly discuss a recent case where this topic was discussed before the Spanish courts in the context of a judicial patent dispute between Erasmus Universiteit Medisch Centrum Rotterdam (“Erasmus) and its licensee, on the one hand,…
On 27 January 2022, the Spanish Supreme Court handed down a very interesting judgment dealing with a dispute surrounding the ownership of a patent application that claims a system to produce domestic hot and cold water. Judgments dealing with patent ownership are very scarce in Spain. Hence the interest of this case, the background to…
After the disruption brought on by the pandemic, it seems that this year the Mobile Word Congress (“MWC”), the largest mobile trade event in the world and one of the most significant trade fairs held in Barcelona, will take place from 28 February to 3 March 2022 under normal conditions. Against this background, on 10…
According to article 1 of the European Patent Convention (EPC), “a system of law, common to Contracting States for the grant of patents for inventions is established by this Convention.” So, at first glance, it would appear that the European Patent Organisation was meant to be an International Institution governed by the rule of law….
After four years of experience with Spanish Act 24/2015, of 24 July, on Patents (the “new Patent Act”), which came into force on 1 April 2017, the time seems ripe now to update some aspects of the Act that could be further improved. In this vein, earlier this year the Spanish Patent and Trademark Office…
A judgment of 7 July 2021 from the Spanish Supreme Court has been published, which, as discussed below, following the case law from the EPO’s Boards of Appeal, introduces certain guidelines for assessing whether or not an invention is sufficiently described. The background of the case can be summarized as follows: The complainant filed a…
In our blog of 27 August 2021, we explained that the Barcelona Appeal Court (Section 15), in a very interesting Ruling of 16 October 2020, decided that the claims as amended before the EPO Boards of Appeal should become the subject of the national proceedings in lieu of the claims asserted in the initial infringement…
For many years, due to the rigidity of Spanish civil procedure, it was very difficult, if not impossible, to accommodate in national infringement proceedings events that may have taken place in parallel proceedings where the validity of the relevant patent was discussed, namely, opposition proceedings before the European Patent Office (“EPO”). For example, when the…
As readers familiar with the telecoms sector will be well aware, Barcelona hosts every February the Mobile World Congress (“MWC”), the most important international trade fair in this field. Due to the pandemic, last year the organizers decided to cancel the show scheduled for February 2020. This year, a downsized version of the MWC was…
As any aficionado of American legal history will be well aware, Judge Holmes, the third most cited American legal scholar of the 20th century, was nicknamed “the Great Dissenter.” This was a tribute to the 55 dissenting opinions that he wrote during his 29 years serving at the U.S. Supreme Court. Interestingly, over the years…
