Following the issuance of G 2/21 last year, we asked whether the plausibility elephant had left the room. Our Kluwer colleague and friend Miquel Montañá discussed this issue more recently here. Several decisions have meanwhile been issued applying the new “test” in G2/21, the lucidity of which may have reminded readers of the oracle of…

As William Blake put it in Auguries of Innocence, written in 1803 but not published until 1863, “A Robin Redbreast in a cage, puts all heaven in a rage”. So did the ill-crafted concept of plausibility with the case law of the EPO’s Technical Boards of Appeal (TBA). It introduced an artificial cage that trapped…

The declining search and examination quality of EPO patents is not only harmful because inventions are not protected but they also create a lot of uncertainty for the industry. The problem has aggravated due to the Unitary Patent system, as thousands of Unitary Patents will flood countries where traditional European patents were not often validated…

A judicial and academic debate on standard essential patents (SEPs) in China has recently arisen. The issuance of anti-suit injunctions (ASIs) by Chinese courts in a relatively short period of time (between 2019 and 2020) and the ensuing TRIPS/WTO dispute between the EU and China over the TRIPS compatibility of such ASIs, exemplify such debate….

The political environment at the EPO remains bumpy. Though some progress is made in relatively minor adjustments of the working conditions, the SUEPO trade union and staff committees remain largely ignored in major reforms. SUEPO writes this in its Annual Report 2022, which was published this week: ‘Numerous meetings take place between staff representatives and…

The EPO and BRPTO are adopting the WIPO Standard ST.26 for the submission of sequence listings in national and international applications filed on or after July 1st, 2022. WIPO Standard ST.26 establishes new rules for the presentation of biological sequences in extensible markup language (XML). This format has many advantages over the former ST.25 (TXT)…

The requirement for immediate and complete substantiation of a request for re-establishment corresponds to the principle of “Eventualmaxime/ Häufungsgrundsatz/ le principe de la concentration des moyens”, according to which the request must state all grounds for re-establishment and means of evidence without the possibility of submitting these at a later stage. Dynamic interpretation of the…

The EPO management has been under increasing criticism for its perceived lack of attention for the deteriorating quality of EPO patents. The subject was put on the agenda prominently last year in October by the Industry Patent Quality Charter (IPQC), a group representing a series of major and smaller international corporations, and endorsed by the…