The European Patent Organisation consists of two organs: the European Patent Office and the Administrative Council. Pursuant to Art. 4 EPC, the task of the Organisation is to grant European patents. This shall be carried out by the European Patent Office supervised by the Administrative Council. Thus, the Administrative Council is supposed to supervise the…
A data sequence can only be regarded as a product directly obtained by a patent-protected process if it has tangible technical properties that are directly imparted on it by this method, and if the data sequence itself can therefore be appropriate subject-matter of a product patent. The representation of an experimental result obtained by a…
The surprising request by the German Federal Constitutional Court (FCC) to the German President to wait with his executing of the UPC ratification law, pending the outcome of a – heretofore unknown – constitutional complaint, has made many people wonder what is behind this constitutional complaint and on which alleged violations of the German Basic…
Another significant delay – or even more substantial – trouble seems to be ahead of the Unitary Patent system, due to today’s decision of the German Constitutional Court (Bundesverfassungsgericht) in Karlsruhe. The Bundesverfassungsgericht has requested the German President not to sign the bills already approved by Bundestag and Bundesrat on the ratification of the Unitary…
Germany has unfortunately no Fordham conference where an impressive number of eminent IP scholars, judges and practitioners, including even representatives of the EPO, get together once every year to discuss the state of the patent universe and future developments. However, Germany does luckily at least have its Max Planck Institute for Innovation and Competition in…
In this case, the Federal Court of Justice considered the value of a secondary indicium for a decision on inventive step. The FCJ confirmed that if an invention differs from the decades-old general practice in the relevant technical field, then this may be an auxiliary criterion supporting inventive step. A full summary of this case…
Our indefatigable Kluwer News Blogger has obviously not failed to realize that another draft of the Rules of Procedure has just appeared on the UPC website. To confuse everybody, this draft is still called the 18th draft and seems to date from 19 October 2015. Yet if you go through the Status history, you will…
The duration of proceedings before the Boards of Appeal (BoA) currently is the EPO’s biggest problem in regard to speed. According to the latest Annual Report by the Boards of Appeal, the average length of inter partes proceedings is 37 months (up 1 month from 2015), i.e. more than three years. In 2016, two appeals…
Early certainty in opposition proceedings is clearly a desirable objective, and the President’s commitment to lowering the average duration of (normal) opposition proceedings to 15 months on the average deserves praise. In our experience, the new commitment has already started to result in that the summons to oral proceedings are issued sooner and that the…
The current President of the EPO claims in his blog that there is a general demand from the users of the EPO – i.e. primarily the applicants – to have a timely delivery of the work product of the EPO. In his words (emphasis added): But, as with any good service, good products need to…
