The Administrative Tribunal of the ILO (ILOAT), which decided a series of cases concerning the EPO in its 125th session last week, dismissed a complaint of the former SUEPO trade union chairman Elizabeth Hardon against her downgrading by EPO president Benoit Battistelli. After the suicide of an EPO employee in May 2012, Hardon, at the…
(UPDATES) The European Patent Litigators Association (EPLIT) is the latest of several organisations that have published their view on the constitutional complaint against ratification of the Unified Patent Court Agreement in Germany. The complaint was filed last year by European patent attorney Dr. Ingve Björn Stjerna. The Federal Constitutional Court in Germany requested a series…
Latvia has completed the ratification formalities of the Unified Patent Court Agreement by depositing its instrument of ratification with the secretariat of the EU Council. It is the 15th state to do so, after Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Italy, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Malta, the Netherlands, Portugal, and Sweden. Latvia will form a Nordic-Baltic…
In our last blog (Will the Spanish Patent Office accept the modification of an SPC’s term after the Incyte judgment?), published on 8 January 2018, we raised the question as to whether the Spanish Patent and Trademark Office (“SPTO”) would accept the modification of the term of a supplementary protection certificate (“SPC”) after the judgment…
The possibility to discuss and comment on blog posts is a valuable characteristic of the Kluwer Patent Blog. The editors of this blog welcome the increasing number of readers and comments on posts over the past months. Questions raised were answered, opinions expressed were welcomed with counter-opinions, some errors were corrected, and relevant discussions were…
There has been much excitement and comment amongst the UK patent profession following the Supreme Court’s decision in Actavis v Eli Lilly [2017] UKSC 48 (see previous comment here) on patent claim construction. However, the Court in that case did not clarify how “normal” principles of claim interpretation are now to be applied, and whether…
Co-author: Zsolt Lengyel, Danubia Patent and Law Office Just before Christmas, on 20 December 2017, the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) announced its judgment in C-492/16, Incyte, in a preliminary ruling proceeding initiated by the Budapest High Court. The decision can be considered a sequel to the CJEU’s earlier judgment C-471/15, Seattle…
An EPO board of appeal observed that a careful opponent that is economically active in the same field as the patentee should search for internal evidence of public prior use before filing an opposition. If such internal evidence is filed belatedly, the fact the search was started only after filing the opposition per se is…
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit has affirmed the Patent Trial and Appeal Board’s rejection on inter partes review of 16 claims of a patent for a handheld universal tool for use with various remote tire pressure monitoring systems. The Board erred, however, in denying the patent owner’s request to substitute 16…
The constitutional complaint which was filed last year against German ratification of the Unified Patent Court Agreement, has been shrouded in secrecy. The complaint has not been published, nor the observations about the case, which the German Federal Constitutional Court (FCC) requested from goverment and a series of other organizations. Professor Winfried Tilmann gave his…
