Draft rules for the Patent Mediation and Arbitration Centre (PMAC) of the Unified Patent Court (UPC) will be discussed during the next meeting of the UPC Preparatory Committee on 19 October 2015. Together with these rules, a Memorandum of Operation will be introduced regarding the proposed legal and operational structure of the Centre. Sam Granata,…
Secessionist pressure grows in Catalonia, after regional elections on 27 September 2015 (qualified as an informal referendum on independence) were won by supporters of an independent Catalonia. In Scotland supporters of independence have been far from silenced since they lost a referendum on the same issue last year. Kluwer IP Law found the following article…
‘Europe can become a more attractive forum for patent enforcement than the US’, according to Wouter Pors, partner of Bird & Bird. Kluwer IP Law interviewed him about the new draft proposal for the Rules on the European Patent Litigation Certificate and other appropriate qualifications. ‘We shouldn’t just focus on the minimum requirements.’ Pors expects the…
The enlarged board of appeal of the European patent office allowed a petition for review of a board decision because the right to be heard had been denied. The decisive ground for the decision under review involved a new conclusion from a document that was in the proceedings. This conclusion could not be directly derived…
An EPO board held that an appellant in a cross-appeal can be bound by an analogy of the bar against reformatio in peius, when filing a request later than with the grounds of appeal. When the appellant could have filed the request with the grounds of appeal, but filed the request only in response to…
The CJEU decided on a referral by the District Court Düsseldorf with regard to the interpretation of Art. 102 TFEU in the context of patent infringement actions regarding standard essential patents (SEPs). The Court held that the owner of an SEP who seeks injunctive relief against an alleged infringer does not abuse a dominant position…
Inspired by several Finnish companies, like many other interest groups, having expressed their concern regarding the level of renewal fees of the Unitary Patent, I thought of writing about a slightly different protection regime that provides not only fast but also low-cost protection for technical inventions, namely, utility models. First I have a question for…
Spain will not change its mind and join the Unitary Patent package, now that the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) has dismissed its legal challenges of the patent package, laid out in the EU Regulations 1257/2012 and 1260/2012 and the UPC Agreement. This is the expectation of the Confederation of Employers and…
An EPO board held that observations filed by third parties during inter parte appeal must be disregarded by the board, unless they concern amendments during opposition or appeal, in which case the board had discretion whether or not to consider the observations in the examination of the amendments. Also when a party to the appeal…
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…
