Regardless of whether someone intends to enforce their own supplementary protection certificate (SPC) or finds themself at the receiving end of an SPC infringement action, the question which grounds of invalidity justify the revocation of an SPC may become highly relevant. This question is all the more intriguing in light of the CJEU’s corresponding case…
In light of the Teva/Gilead-judgment handed down on 25 July 2018 by the CJEU (C-121/17) as well as the latest referral from the German Federal Patent Court dated 17 October 2017 in re Sitagliptin III (14 W (pat) 12/17), which is pending as C-650/17, Prof. Meier-Beck, the presiding Judge of the German Federal Supreme Court,…
In a recent decision The Hague Court of Appeal mixes a cocktail of SPC case law of the Court of Justice of the European Union. The ingredients: 1/3 Sanofi, 1/3 Boehringer and 1/3 Gilead and a sniff of Georgetown. Shake well with the skilled person’s common general knowledge and the basic patent’s description (warning: do…
A quarter-century after supplementary protection certificates (SPCs) were introduced in the European Union, there are still a number of unresolved questions as to which types of products are, in principle, eligible for SPC protection. One further important piece in this puzzle will be provided by the CJEU’s forthcoming decision in the pending referral Abraxis Bioscience…
Practitioners dealing with supplementary protection certificates (SPCs) have been holding their breath at the unfolding of the “Truvada saga” around Gilead’s SPCs for the HIV medicament Truvada, which contains the active ingredients tenofovir disoproxil and emtricitabine. The lawsuits involving the Truvada SPCs in various European countries have already given rise to such noteworthy decisions as…
The SPC system was introduced in the European Union in 1992 to compensate for the heavy penalties imposed on pharmaceutical research due to the curtailment in effective patent term resulting from time-consuming and costly regulatory review. As expressly noted in the Explanatory Memorandum to the original SPC Regulation (COM(90) 101 final-SYN 255), the legislative intent…
Supplementary protection certificates (SPCs) used to be granted in the European Union only for novel active ingredients, but not for new therapeutic applications of previously authorized active ingredients. While this practice fundamentally changed as a result of the CJEU’s landmark decision Neurim (C-130/11) of 19 July 2012, the scope of this ruling has given rise…
A recent study by two eminent scholars from the Max Planck Institute for Innovation and Competition (MPI) on „The Impact of Brexit on Unitary Patent Protection and its Court“, which is available here, casts significant doubts whether it will be possible for the United Kingdom to stay in the UPC Agreement after the UK has…
One of the points sometimes debated in patent cases is the date when a claim for patent infringement becomes “time-barred” (i.e. the date on which it “prescribes”). The traditional position adopted by the courts in countries like Germany and Spain is that in the case of continuing acts of infringement, the time-barred period (e.g. 5…
To ensure you don’t miss out on interesting IP law developments reported on our other IP blogs, we will, on a regular basis, provide you with an overview of the top 3 most-read posts from each of our IP law blogs. Here are the top posts from June, July and August. Top 3 Kluwer Copyright…
