Patents

(Clifford Chance)/ /1 Comment

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…

Patents

(Clifford Chance)/

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…

Infringement, Patents, Pharmaceutical patent, Spain, SPC

(Clifford Chance)/ /1 Comment

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…

CJEU, Patents, SPC

(Clifford Chance)/

The long and winding road, as The Beatles would put it, that led to the judgments of the CJEU in Teva et altri v. Gilead Sciences (Case C-121/17) and Royalty Pharma v. Deutsches Patent und Markenamt (Case C-650/17), which renewed the Court’s case law on the meaning of “product“, started in the Medeva judgment (Case…

Inventive step, Patents, Spain

(Clifford Chance)/ /9 Comments

On 28 December 2020, the Barcelona Court of Appeal (Section 15), one of Spain’s most experienced courts on patent matters, handed down a judgment which is interesting from a wide array of perspectives (how to assess inventive step, novelty, infringement, etc.). This blog will focus on the first aspect (i.e. inventive step) and, more specifically,…

(Indirect) infringement, Patents, Spain

(Clifford Chance)/

A recent judgment of 13 November 2020 from the Barcelona Court of Appeal (Section 15) has brought to the fore again the thorny topic of “indirect” or “contributory” infringement. The difficulty of the topic is illustrated, for example, by the fact that two very learned Judges (Judge Arnold, then in the first instance and Judge…

Inventive step, Novelty, Patents, Spain

(Clifford Chance)/ /1 Comment

Spain has a well-deserved reputation of being a rather formalistic country when it comes to litigation. For example, according to the Civil Procedure Act, a Spanish translation of documents written in languages other than Spanish must be attached to the initial complaint. Otherwise, the Court may simple ignore them. A judgment of 15 October 2019…

Covid-19, TRIPS, TRIPs Agreement

(Clifford Chance)/ /2 Comments

As Bob Hudec explained in his legendary The GATT Legal System and World Trade Diplomacy, GATT’s (since 1995, WTO) long-standing practice of seeking to adopt decisions by consensus finds its roots in 1947, when the then 23 parties to GATT were a small club of good friends. The proposition that a friend might impose a…