This will only be a very short post, but one important new development on the borderline of patent law and antitrust law shall not be left unnoticed on this blog. The European Commission has fined Teva a whopping €462.6 million for abusing its dominant position to delay competition to its blockbuster medicine for the treatment…
We have long meant to write something about the need, or the lack thereof, for adapting the description to amended claims. The announcement in the second preliminary opinion of Technical Board of Appeal (TBA) 3.3.04 in T 56/21, suggesting a referral of this question to the Enlarged Board of Appeal, combined with the sole appellant’s…
The first decisions by the Central Division Munich, the Local Division Paris and the Local Division Düsseldorf adjudging a patent’s validity in main proceedings are now out. Taken together, they confirm the initial favourable impression from applications for provisional measures and demonstrate that this Court is fully up to task. As regards validity, it…
Following months of speculation, EPO Board of Appeal 3.2.01 yesterday issued decision T 439/22 referring questions to the Enlarged Board of Appeal on the extent to which the description and drawings should be used in claim interpretation. The claim feature at issue was: “in which the aerosol-forming substrate comprises a gathered sheet”. The key…
A report on OxViews 9th IP and Competition Forum and the Osnabrücker Patenttage 2024 The question on how intellectual property and specifically patents can contribute to sustainable innovations that contribute towards the both inevitable and highly desirable transition towards a CO2-neutral economy happened to be the key subject of no less than two conferences that…
1. Preamble: The Iron Triangle In project management there is a law known as the Iron Triangle, which states that in delivering any project, there are three points on a metaphorical triangle: time, cost and quality. In other words: how fast can the project be done; how cheaply; and what is the quality of the…
All in all, the EPO can rightly be proud of the high quality of the translations it currently offers to its users. Many of my clients have been using the EPO’s translation services when (part of) a hearing was in German or French, and I was constantly advised that they considered the translations excellent and…
There are now three interesting developments, albeit in quite different areas, which have in common the effort to avoid stepping on banana skins on the path towards a more unified patent system. The first one, published last week, was a decision by the Court of Appeal (CoA) itself, which took the opportunity to clarify that…
Following the issuance of G 2/21 last year, we asked whether the plausibility elephant had left the room. Our Kluwer colleague and friend Miquel Montañá discussed this issue more recently here. Several decisions have meanwhile been issued applying the new “test” in G2/21, the lucidity of which may have reminded readers of the oracle of…
The EPO’s Boards of Appeal are famously strict on added matter. But normally applicants can sleep soundly at night after making amendments based entirely on the original dependent claims having appropriate back references, especially where the amendments still cover the examples. T 1137/21 however might cause some applicants sleepless nights, as the Board found the…
