Barcelona Commercial Courts have a well-deserved reputation for being dynamic and creative. Not surprisingly, it was Judge Ferrándiz, already retired from the Supreme Court, who back in 1993, when he was sitting at Section 15 of the Court of Appeal of Barcelona, had the idea of specializing that Section on a small number of commercial…

As was rightly noted on this blog, the skilled person’s “hope” of solving the objective technical problem using the means that led to the (later claimed) invention, has disappeared from the Guidelines for Examination. What we are left with is the (perhaps) more objective “expectation of some improvement or advantage (see T/83)”. Interestingly, this expectation…

On 5 December 2019, the IP Tribunal of the Supreme People’s Court (SPC) handed down two decisions in which – in a first for China, the SPC heard and decided on both the patent validity and infringement disputes in one consolidated proceeding.  Background The two actions arose out of a patent infringement dispute between the…

As the clock strikes midnight on 31 December 2019, we hope that the new Rules of Procedure of the Boards of Appeal (RPBA) will not be the first thing on our minds. Nevertheless, the beginning of this new decade will mark the entry into force of these new rules, which look set to have a…

The leading Supreme Court case of Actavis v Eli Lilly [2017] UKSC 48 introduced a doctrine of equivalents into UK patent law for the first time in many years. Since then, the Court of Appeal has given further guidance on this doctrine in Icescape Limited v Ice-World International BV & Ors [2018] EWCA Civ 2219…