A Supplementary Protection Certificate (SPC) extends the term of a patent for a medicinal or plant protection product by a period of not more than five years. The aim of SPCs is to compensate the patent owner for ‘lost’ patent protection which was caused by the time it took to obtain marketing authorisation for the product in question. An SPC is a national right, available in member states of the European Union (EU) by application to the national patent office of the state for which a certificate is desired. The SPC is based on a patent and is granted in respect of an active ingredient in a medicinal or plant protection product.
The messy case law from the Court of Justice of the European Union (“CJEU”) on supplementary protection certificates (“SPC”) that protect “combinations” of pharmaceutical products has left many patentees that relied in good faith on the criteria laid down by the CJEU in the judgment of 16 September 1999, Case C-392/97 (“Farmitalia”) with patents whose…
In the last instance, the Consiglio di Stato (the Italian supreme administrative court) established that Pfizer did commit abuse of a dominant position while it obtained and enforced in Italy its SPC protection over latanoprost. While the news was spread a few weeks ago already (the decision is dated 14 January 2014), the reasons of…
As my colleague Rik Lambers, from Brinkhof, reported in the blog he posted last Thursday (12 December 2013), that day was a big day for Supplementary Protection Certificate (“SPC“) aficionados, since the European Court of Justice (“ECJ“) published three new judgments that will further feed the long-running saga of SPC decisions. Readers will no doubt…
SPC judgments galore in Luxembourg this morning. The Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) provided its judgments in the Eli Lilly case (C‑493/12), in the Actavis case (C‑443/12), and in the Georgetown case (C‑484/12). The CJEU’s Medeva judgment (case C-322/10), and AG Trstenjak’s opinion in that case, raised burning questions on the interpretation…
It is hard to think of a recent SPC case before the UK courts where the judge has not had to refer questions to the CJEU in order to either clarify the terms of the SPC Regulation or the CJEU’s earlier interpretations. This necessity has arisen at an early stage in an action between Actavis…
In Medeva (C-322/10 of 24 November 2011) the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) had ruled that a Supplementary Protection Certificate relating to a combination of active ingredients can only be granted in view of Art. 3(a) of the Regulation (EC) No. 469/2009, if the active ingredients are “specified” in the wording of…
In my earlier posts (here and here) I reported and commented on the first two phases of the Italian Pfizer antitrust case, in which the Italian Antitrust Authority (IAA) accused Pfizer of having abused of a dominant position by judicially enforcing patent rights against generic latanoprost in the Italian Courts. A small but potentially meaningful…
The High Court (Arnold J.) decided to refer further questions on the interpretation of Article 3 of the SPC Regulation to the CJEU,, particularly in relation to the Article 3(a) requirement that “the product is protected by a basic patent in force”, suggesting an interpretation which focuses on the “inventive concept” of the patent rather…
On 15 January 2013, the French Cour de cassation, in the litigation between the Novartis companies and the Actavis companies about valsartan, drew the consequences of the 9 February 2012 order rendered by the CJEU in the frame of a parallel litigation in the United Kingdom. As already explained in a previous post, the company governed by the laws…
Faithfully implementing Article 9 §4 of Directive No. 2004/48/EC, Arti-cle L. 615–3 of the French Intellectual Property Code (hereinafter referred to as “IPC”) authorizes French courts to grant an interim injunction order after an inter partes proceedings (before the Judge ruling in preliminary proceedings) but also after an ex parte proceedings. As required by the EC Directive, the ex parte…
