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A first review of the EPO’s proposals for the EP-UE renewal fees in comparison to the current rates by Thorsten Bausch and Greg Sach The EPO, or more specifically the president of the EPO, has recently submitted proposals for the level of renewal fees for the future European Patent with Unitary Effect (EP-UE) to the…
The Patent Trial and Appeal Board did not err in affirming a patent examiner’s obviousness rejection of an application that disclosed a system for using two-way communication satellites to regulate the activation of a vehicle’s ignition, based on a driver’s mental state as determined by response times, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal…
In August 2013, I produced a short commentary for the Kluwer Patent Blog regarding the decision of Mr Recorder Meade QC in SDL Hair Ltd v Next Row Ltd & Ors [2013] EWPCC 31, where Mr Meade was faced with the question of whether two letters and one email constituted groundless threats of patent infringement…
Once the Unified Patent Court has started functioning, local divisions may have to consolidate into regional divisions or shut down altogether, because it turns out they have too few cases to prosper. That is the expectation of Richard Vary, head of litigation of Nokia. At the Unitary Patent Package Conference in Amsterdam last February, Vary…
The Supplementary Protection Certificate (“SPC”) seas have been relatively calm after the turmoil caused by “Super Thursday” (i.e. 12 December 2013), when shortly before packing for Christmas the Court of Justice of the European Union (“CJEU”) published three judgments on SPCs in a row. However, over the last few months there have been recent developments,…
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),…
Direct access to seized documents, selected from a larger pool of previously seized evidence, is denied on the basis of Dutch procedural provisions relating to Directive 2004/48/EC, because the defendant has not been allowed prior review of the seized selection. The court only allows access to a limited selection obtained by sufficient specific key word…
The CoA Karlsruhe held that the fact that a referral is pending before the CJEU regarding the issues of the criteria for raising the FRAND defense (C-170/13 Huawei) does not justify the suspension of the enforcement of an infringement judgment issued against a defendant. The court also expressed their expectation that – even after a…
The German Bundesgerichtshof has issued a decision (X ZR 41/13) called “Quetiapin” which discusses a fundamental question of the Patent Law, i.e. the definition of the “technical problem” underlying an invention. The claim of the European Patent under discussion concerned a sustained release formulation. The Patent Court had nullified the (German part of the) patent…
