The “patent linkage system” is in general a system wherein market approval of generic drugs is linked with the status of the originator drug’s patents, for the purpose of early resolution of patent disputes and ensuring the stable and consistent supply of generic drugs. Japan has not statutorily adopted the patent linkage system, but the…

The transposition of the 2016 directive on trade secrets into French law by the law of 31 July 2018 and its implementing decree could have led to the expectation of difficulties with the so-called “saisies-contrefaçons”. The main one to remember is undoubtedly the application of the new article R. 153-1 of French Commercial Code to…

Having been teaching Public International Law since 1990 and being a tenured professor of this field of law, this author has some difficulty in understanding the state of collective nirvana that the UPC Preparatory Committee has instilled amidst the UPC community, by causing them to believe that the “Protocol to the Agreement on a UPC…

The hurdle for being a co-inventor in a medicine field in Japan might be a little higher than what is expected from precedents. The IP High Court affirmed, in its judgement of 17th March 2021 (2020 (ne) No. 10053), the first instance decision of 21st August 2020 (2017 (wa) No. 27378) which denied co-inventorship of…

Another constitutional complaint against the Unified Patent Court Agreement? Is Italy withdrawing from the UPC? If even April fools’ day doesn’t go by without a proportion of jokes on the Unitary Patent project, one can be certain that after years of stagnation the Unified Patent Court and the Unitary Patent are fully back on the…

In two separate judgments, the Full Court has provided much needed clarity on how to identify the pharmaceutical products that can support a valid patent term extension in Australia, as Natalie Shoolman, Kent Teague and Rose Jenkins explain in this article. Takeaways: Patent term extensions must be based on the “earliest first regulatory approval date”…

In a complex case concerning blockbuster cinacalcet, Section 15 of the Barcelona Court of Appeals makes findings on the non-obviousness of inventions consisting of the provision of an unexpected technical effect. In these cases, the technical problem can be reformulated as providing such effect, provided that it is related to the problem initially disclosed in…

SPCs are often valuable and therefore important to their proprietors.  Indeed, such is the potential value of an additional period of exclusivity, that in the last decade or so, we have seen SPCs challenged where only a few weeks or even a few days of the SPC term remain.   It is therefore hardly surprising, especially…