In Odiorne v. Winkley (1814), Harvard professor Joseph Story, then sitting as a Judge at a Circuit Court of the District of Massacusetts, upon being called to decide whether a machine infringed a patent wrote, in the context of that case, that “The material question, therefore, is not whether the same elements of motion, or…
Barcelona Commercial Courts have a well-deserved reputation for being dynamic and creative. Not surprisingly, it was Judge Ferrándiz, already retired from the Supreme Court, who back in 1993, when he was sitting at Section 15 of the Court of Appeal of Barcelona, had the idea of specializing that Section on a small number of commercial…
In view of the upcoming Christmas season, in light of a judgment of 15 October 2019 from the Court of Appeal of Valencia published recently, a call for caution for Father Christmas is in order. The facts of the case may be summarized as follows. The company Smart Trike MNF LTD (“Smart Trike”), which owns…
Our friends from the EPLAW Patent Blog recently published an interesting blog commenting on the judgment of 29 March 2019 from the Court of Appeal of Barcelona (Section 15) where, among other aspects, the requirements for requesting the limitation of a European patent before the Spanish Patents and Trademarks Office (“SPTO”) were discussed. As explained…
Since the Ruling of 19 September 2012 from the Barcelona Court of Appeal (Section 15), this Court has taken the view that when a preliminary injunction is ordered “ex parte“, if it is later lifted, the applicant is always obliged to compensate the defendant for the damages that may have been caused. This conclusion has…
As readers are well aware, one of the difficult tasks when applying article 69 of the European Patent Convention (“EPC”) and its Protocol of Interpretation is to strike the right balance between “interpreting” the claims in the context of the specification, while, at the same time, avoiding “importing” features of the specification into the claims….
One of the principles inherited from Roman law is that “venire contra factum propium non valet“. In civil law countries such as Spain, this principle is normally labelled as the “doctrine that prohibits acting against one’s own acts” (prohibición de actuar contra los propios actos). In common law countries, the principle is normally associated with…
Over the last few months, SPC aficionados have been expecting the birth of what is known as the “SPC Manufacturing Exception” proposed by the European Commission. Readers will remember that in May 2018, the European Commission proposed an amendment to Regulation (EC) No 469/2009 of the European Parliament and of the Council of 6 May…
One of the actors that has been seeking to pop-up in the European patent theatre in recent decades is plausibility. As readers will be aware, the debate around plausibility initially arose at the European Patent Office in the mid-1990s (T 939/92, AgrEvo) at a time when applications with extremely broad claims were in vogue, particularly…
A recently published Decision of 9 November 2018 from Barcelona Commercial Court number 5 sheds some light on the indicia that may or may not be sufficient for the purposes of ordering a preliminary injunction “ex parte”. For the readers’ benefit, it will be useful to clarify that under Spanish law, one of the requirements…
