The English High Court (Arnold J.) has granted an application for a stay of the UK High Court proceedings to revoke the UK designation of an EP patent pending the outcome of opposition proceedings at the EPO. The decision is unusual as Arnold J had previously refused to stay the validity proceedings in this case…
During examination poor quality drawings had been replaced by drawings that made more details visible. The opponent argued that replacement of these drawings by the original drawings, to overcome Article 123(2) objections, extended the scope of protection (Article 123(3)). The board concluded that the skilled person remained clearly able to determine what was protected, because…
A panel of the Enlarged Board of Appeal (EBA) of the EPO rejected a request to replace the EBA chairman for suspected partiality. The reasons for allowing such a request in decision R19/12 had since been removed because the chairman had discontinued all his managerial activities in the senior management committees of the EPO. Under…
Lord Hoffman (former Court of Appeal judge and presently at Queen Mary University) spoke about what can be done to harmonise the law. He said that the governments of most jurisdictions accept that judges have some choice in how the law is developed. There is then a range of views of how much regard should…
I am happy to announce the release of my book US Patent Law for European Patent Professionals. An understanding of US patent law within the context of the US legal system has become increasingly important for patent professionals in Europe in recent decades. Europe and the US are closely linked economic zones, and many inventions…
On 24 March, 2015, the Enlarged Board of Appeal of the EPO, the final judicial arbiter of the interpretation of the European Patent Convention, issued Decision G 3/14 addressing the question of when, and to what extent, clarity objections could be raised by a party challenging the validity of a patent through the EPO’s Opposition…
The judgement “Schleifprodukt” rendered by the German Federal Court of Justice on 25 November 2014 could be seen as a step towards harmonisation with the EPO because the court carried out the test for the admissibility of claim amendments by assessing whether the feature combination of the amended claim in its entirety represents a technical teaching which is identifiable from the original application as being suitable for achieving the effects of the invention.
The Board of Appeal rejected an attempt to apply the fiction of novelty of “medical” substances and compositions of article 54(5) EPC to a dialysis membrane. Contrary to T2003/08 the claimed dialysis membrane did not contain any further substance that might constitute an active ingredient. With reference to arguments in T2003/08, the board noted that…
The Board emphasized that there was a relation between who was to be considered to be the skilled person for judging inventive step on one hand and the choice of the closest prior art on the other hand. A general problem to modify a product from one field so that it could be used in…
Inventions regarding a method of improving the yield of triploid seedless watermelons by pollination with a specific type of diploid water melon are not to be regarded as an essentially biological process for the production of plants and are therefore not excluded from patentability under Article 53(b) EPC. These biotechnological inventions according to Rule 26(2),…
