A post on the new guidelines for examination of the European Patent Office tops the list of most popular articles of the Kluwer Patent Blog in 2019. The enduring social problems at the EPO led to a series of well read blogposts as well; the leadership change at the organisation has unfortunately not led to…
“Alle Jahre wieder” (Every year) is the title of one of the most popular German Christmas songs. And alle Jahre wieder / every year there is advent time, which seems to be the perfect time for the invocation of the immediately imminent advent of the Unified Patent Court (UPC). MIP made the start with its…
The Supreme Court held that the Court of Appeal was entitled to treat the judge’s failure to appreciate the logical consequence of a particular finding as an error of principle which allowed an appellate court to carry out its own evaluation. Therefore the Court of Appeal was entitled to interfere with the trial judge’s assessment…
The jurisprudence of the Court of Justice for the European Union is not excluding the possibility to allow a non-EU Member State forming part of the UPCA. This is one of the conclusions in ‘EU Patent and Brexit’, a research paper which was requested by the European Parliament’s Committee on Legal Affairs and commissioned, overseen…
The Supreme Court handed down its judgment on 23 October 2019, marking the end of a 13-year struggle between the inventor, Prof Ian Shanks, and Unilever for compensation in relation to an invention relating to disposable glucose monitoring equipment. The judgment of the Supreme Court provides valuable guidance on the matters to be taken into…
On 9 October 2019, the Court of Appeal dismissed an appeal against the finding that a patent directed towards ceramic compounds was sufficient and allowed two procedural appeals on issues of liability. Anan Kasei and Rhodia (“Rhodia”) are respectively the proprietor and exclusive licensee of a patent for ceric oxide compounds for use in catalytic…
One of the features that render the European Union’s Supplementary Protection Certificate (SPC) unique in comparison to similar legal instruments in other jurisdictions, including the United States and Japan, is that there is no legal provision expressly calling for any specific relationship or agreement between the patent proprietor (and SPC applicant) on the one hand,…
‘Why Berlin can’t wait for Brexit in matters of UPC’, is the title of a recent article on the website of the German law firm Kather Augenstein. Main point: if the Federal Constitutional Court dismisses the constitutional complaint against the Unified Patent Court Agreement, the German government will have to finish the ratification procedure immediately,…
The Court rejected a claim that a new action brought by the claimant asserting additional patents from its portfolio was an abuse of process, finding that a radical change in position by the defendant had driven the need for the claimant to bring an action on other patents. Case date: 17 April 2019 Case number:…
The Court of Appeal allowed ZyXEL’s appeal, finding that in light of its waiver of its RAND licence rights, declaratory relief to determine the scope and terms of the licence which TQD was bound to offer to the two ZyXEL parties would no longer serve a useful purpose. Case date: 18 July 2019 Case number:…
