Today (20 January 2021) seems to be a perfect day to celebrate democracy and the rule of law. I will therefore not keep you up for too long, but just wanted to make a short personal comment and a call to all of us discussing the UPCA and the latest events in Germany regarding the…
While it is my impression that the IP profession, on the whole, has not had to suffer much under the current COVID-19 pandemic, the same is unfortunately not true for our patent attorney trainees. It all started in early 2020. By then about 1800 trainees had been busy for months learning and getting ready for…
So the consultation of the public by the Boards of Appeal has ended today. It will be interesting to see the results and the impact, if any, they will have on the final wording of Art. 15a EPC. In the meantime, please enjoy these remarkable oral proceedings before the Committee of Labour and Social Matters…
Let’s start with a bit of etymology today. The official translation of “European Patent Office” into German is “Europäisches Patentamt”, the latter obviously being a composite of Patent and Amt.The German word “Amt” is derived from medieval German “ambt” or “ambahte“, which means servant. That is, the prime function of an Amt is to serve…
In these days and times, we are constantly reminded how important and how endangered seemingly simple concepts are such as truth, facts, science and trust. Hannah Arendt, the famous Jewish German-born American political philosopher, wrote about seventy years ago in her first major work “The Origins of Totalitarism” The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is…
Searching the EPO’s website for the terms “user-friendly” and/or “user friendliness” will result in your screen being flooded by hits describing the remarkable achievements and ongoing efforts by the EPO to be a fantastic (in the UK they would probably even call it world-beating) service provider for its users. As with other noble goals such…
As is well known, not least since Mark Twain’s famous and unforgettable analysis, the Awful German Language is full of funny compound words (actually, according to Mark Twain, “they are not words, they are alphabetic processions”) for which no direct equivalent seems to exist in English or any other language. Schweinsgalopp is one of these…
As readers of this blog will be aware, the EPO applies a quite peculiar and unique method to the analysis of inventive step, the “problem-solution approach”. This approach breaks the statutory question of Art 56 whether the invention was, having regard to the state of the art, obvious to a person skilled in the art,…
By now, the decision by the Federal Constitutional Court (FCC) voiding the German law approving the ratification of the UPC Agreement has gone viral in the patent world, though fortunately not pandemic. Most of the usual suspects have already taken position for one side or the other, so I thought I might likewise throw my…
Karlsruhe, 20.3.2020 The Federal Constitutional Court (FCC) issued its long-awaited decision in the case 2 BvR 739/17 on the constitutional appeal of Dr. Stjerna about the compatibility of the German ratification law for the Agreement on a Unified Patent Court (UPCA) with the German Basic Law (BL) this morning. It declared the German Ratification Law…
