When analysing inventive activity, one risk that appears to be here to stay is that of hindsight. As Richard Ebbink very aptly put it in a workshop held at the INGRES Institute in Zurich on 8 and 9 September 2017 in honour of Dr. Dieter Brändle – the first President of the Swiss Federal Patent…
By Gregory Bacon Yes, you read that right. Thirteen years after the House of Lords had firmly shut the door on any notion of a doctrine extending the scope of patent protection outside the claims, the UK Supreme Court in yesterday’s judgment in Actavis v Eli Lilly [2017] UKSC 48 reversed gear and reintroduced a…
When this author published his blog of 27 June 2017, a reader kindly sent in a comment pointing out that as this author had not inserted the word “Spanish” before “Supreme Court”, and the blog was written in English, the reader had been misled; he initially thought that the judgment discussed had been issued by…
One of the remedies established in case of patent infringement in the Spanish Patents Act that was in force until 31 March 2017 was “the publication of the judgment finding against the infringer of the patent, at this party’s expense, through announcements and notifications to the interested persons. This measure will only be applicable when…
In relation to a patent that protected the interaction of a key and a cylinder in order to constitute a security locking system, the Barcelona Court of Appeal (Section 15) handed down a Judgment on 14 July 2016 in which it declared that the Defendant had directly infringed this patent by reproducing one of the…
No doubt, one of the patentability requirements which is more difficult to examine is inventive step. Unlike other requirements, which call for a more objective analysis, inventive activity requires a subjective judgment, that is, whether the invention would have been obvious to a person skilled in the art. Taking into account that, inevitably, inventive activity…
Although the title of this blog will sound trite to many friends accustomed to arguing patent cases before the European Patent Office, it does not sound so trite when read against the background of Spanish case law. For years it was relatively rare for the Spanish Supreme Court to accept appeals in patent matters, which…
One of the difficulties that patent owners sometimes encounter when they are planning to apply for a preliminary injunction is the dearth of evidence. A decision handed down on 23 February 2017 by Barcelona Commercial Court No. 5 may shed some light on patent owners who need additional evidence to support an application for a…
On 24 November 2016, the Court of Appeal of Barcelona (Section 15) handed down a judgment in which it confirmed that “the interpretation of the scope of protection of a patent for the purposes of analysing its validity cannot be different from when its infringement is analysed”. The Judges also highlighted the relevance of the…
Most readers will be aware of the so-called “all elements” test, whereby patent infringement is normally discarded unless the allegedly infringing device or process reproduces each and every element of the claim. The “all elements” test contrasts with the so-called “essentiality” test. According to this test, there can still be infringement if an element of…
