On 10 February 2012 the Spanish Court handed down a judgment where it accepted for the first time the concept of a “springboard” injunction as a remedy aimed at curing acts of infringement carried out before a patent expires. The background to the case may be summarised as follows: A manufacturer of generic drugs filed…
The Supreme Court dismissed an appeal , dismissing a revocation action against the patent in suit, which protected the calcium salt of atorvastatin. The Supreme court held that (i) the Bolar provision does not apply with retrospective effect, because its origin and rationale is different from the Experimental Use Exception; and (ii.) an invention that…
By Miquel Montañá In year 2021, Italy will celebrate the 600th anniversary of the patent granted by the Republic of Florence to Filippo Brunelleschi for his ship “Il Badalone”, the first patent ever granted. Quite ironically, the fathers of the first patent, and of the first Patent Act, approved by the Republic of Venice in…
Over the last few years, Spanish Courts have struggled to resolve an avalanche of cases where the core of the discussion was the legal effects of TRIPS on the effects of the Reservation made by Spain when it joined the European Patent Convention in 1986. According to this Reservation, patents filed before 7 October 1992…
The requisite of “imminence” introduced by Directive 2004/48/EC, coupled with the measures approved by the Ministry of Health to speed-up the administrative steps necessary to launch generics, has placed owners of patents that protect chemical and/or pharmaceutical products at a crossroads: if they file an application for a preliminary injunction before the generic medicament has…
In a judgment handed down on 11 November 2011, the Spanish Supreme Court has rejected an appeal filed by four Spanish pharmaceutical companies against a judgment from the Court of Appeal of Barcelona (Section 15), which had rejected a revocation action filed against patent EP 409,281 (Calcium salt of Atorvastatin) owned by Warner-Lambert. Applying the…
On 6 October 2011, Commercial Court number 5 of Barcelona handed down a judgment that has revisited the fine border between the safe territory of so-called “preparatory acts” and the prohibited region of “offers for sale”. MSD filed a patent infringement action against a Spanish company that had obtained marketing authorisation and price to market…
As the readers will know, the complex architecture of the European patent system allows third parties to challenge the validity of a patent by filing an opposition before the European Patent Office (“EPO”), by filing a revocation action before national Courts, or by using both routes. In some cases, this has given rise to the…
The readers will recall that one of the requirements for obtaining preliminary injunctions introduced by Directive 2004/48 (the so-called “Enforcement Directive”) is proving that there is an “imminent” threat of infringement. In cases dealing with the pharmaceutical sector, Spanish Courts have interpreted “imminent” to mean that the defendant is in an objective position to launch…
One of the possible courses of action open to patentees when they suspect that a competitor may be preparing the launch of a product that may infringe a patent in force is to send a warning letter. If the response is evasive, this would normally help the patentee to prove that there is an “imminent”…
