In a previous post here, we described constitutional and procedural challenges to inter partes review (“IPR”) in the Oil States and SAS Institute cases taken up by the U.S. Supreme Court. We also posted here on Allergan’s attempt to avoid an IPR by assigning its challenged patents to an American Indian tribe that claims tribal…
Since the Eli Lilly v. Canada award of 2017, the relevance of international investment law for patents has been known to a wider public. In response to the revocation of two Canadian patents concerning the compounds olanzapine and atomoxetine by Canadian courts, the US pharmaceutical company Eli Lilly initiated arbitral proceedings against Canada on the…
…great forces are up against each other and a dispute arises. Fortunately, it is not a war of biblical dimensions, but only a lawsuit, a significant and legally interesting one though, about an Supplementary Protection Certificate. The parties were Teva (Hebrew word for nature) and Gilead (aka Hill of Testimony, a mountainous region east of…
On 12 July 2017, the UK Supreme Court handed down a ruling which caused a shockwave to resound across the UK patent community. For more than a decade, when addressing the issue of the construction and infringement of a patent, every practitioner would have focussed on the question prescribed by Lord Hoffmann in Kirin Amgen:…
The Supreme Court concluded that it was appropriate for it to reformulate the so-called Improver (or ‘Protocol’) questions, which provide guidance as to whether a variant is immaterial where there is no literal infringement. The significant change is the introduction of hindsight into the determination of the second question: “Would it be obvious to the…
As a follow-up to our previous post “The Federal Circuit Has Its Final Say On the “On-Sale” Bar Under the AIA,” the Supreme Court has granted certiorari in the Helsinn v. Teva case, which concerns whether the America Invents Act (“AIA”) changed the longstanding “on-sale bar” rule. This means that at least four of the nine…
In July 2017, the Patents Court of Barcelona handed down a decision finding that “Swiss-type” claims were affected by the Reservation made by Spain when it ratified the European Patent Convention (“EPC”), whereby European patents, insofar as they confer protection on chemical or pharmaceutical products “as such“, shall be ineffective in Spain. In particular, the…
As most readers will know, yesterday the European Commission published a proposal to amend Regulation 469/2009 concerning the supplementary protection certificate for medicinal products (the “SPC Regulation”) aimed at introducing a so-called “manufacturing exemption for export purposes” (in short, a “manufacturing waiver”). The rationale behind it is that the introduction of this new exemption to…
The European Commission has proposed to introduce an ‘export manufacturing waiver’ to Supplementary Protection Certificates (SPCs) to ‘help Europe’s pharmaceutical companies tap into fast-growing global markets and foster jobs, growth and investments in the EU’. According to a press release of 28 May 2018, ‘Supplementary Protection Certificates extend patent protection for medicinal products which must…
On 28 March 2018, the Australian Government introduced the Intellectual Property Laws Amendment (Productivity Commission Response Part 1 and Other Measures) Bill 2018 to the House of Representatives. This follows IP Australia’s public consultation in October 2017 of an exposure draft of amendments for Australia’s IP laws that included, among other matters, a mechanism to phase out the…
