All Union law arguments against the Unitary Patent system, that are now on the table again because of the German constitutional complaint, have already been rejected in the recent past. Wouter Pors, partner of Bird & Bird, has said this in an interview with Kluwer IP Law. Pors hopes the Federal Constitutional Court (FCC) will…
The “representative” registered with the Swiss Patent Register for the Swiss part of a European patent does not constitute a legal representative within the meaning of the Code of Civil Procedure. Consequently, court documents must not be served to such “representative”, but must be sent by the official channels of judicial assistance in civil matters…
The federal district court in Wilmington, Delaware, did not err in finding that several claims of a patent for preparing a stable formulation of the antibiotic compound ertapenem owned by Merck Sharp & Dohme were invalid as obvious, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit has held. Substantial record evidence supported the district…
When will the Unified Patent Court open its doors and the Unitary Patent (UP) become available? The German constitutional complaint against ratification of the Unified Patent Court Agreement (UPCA) has dashed expectations that the UP system could launch at the end of this year. Considerable delays and even the end of the system in its…
Allergan’s assignment of the patents on one of its blockbuster drugs to an American Indian tribe in an attempt to dismiss a USPTO inter partes review (IPR) proceeding on “tribal sovereign immunity” grounds has shaken up the patent bar – with some dismissing this as, at most, a temporary loophole and others saying “why didn’t…
During the past decade, Spanish courts have debated the impact of the TRIPS Agreement (“TRIPS”) on patents the applications of which were filed before 7 October 1992, that is, before Spain’s Reservation under Article 167 of the European Patent Convention (“EPC”) expired. According to this Reservation, European patents would not have any effects in Spain,…
Just as the case has been in other European jurisdictions, Gilead is currently attempting to enforce its (Danish) SPC for the combination of tenofovir disoproxil (as fumarate) and emtricitabine in Denmark. In the first decision regarding Gilead’s enforcement of this SPC in Denmark, the Danish specialty patents court, the Maritime and Commercial High Court, turned…
Kluwer IP Law announced in September that it was partnering with Aistemos, to distribute Cipher Reports, the latest in AI over IP. This is the back story. Patents date back 400 years, so nothing new. What has evolved is the importance and value of patents, and intangible assets more generally. For the vast majority of…
Patent lawyers in the UK have spent the last three months pondering, debating and at times indulging in an element of despair (to put it mildly) about what might be the impact of the judgment of the Supreme Court in Actavis v Eli Lilly [2017] UKSC 48 on issues of validity (see here). Today they…
In a Judgment dated 12 June 2013, the Spanish Supreme Court confirmed that it was possible to discriminate between different objective technical problems within the same set of claims. Accordingly, an independent claim may be found to be obvious, and yet one of its dependent claims could still be deemed valid, provided that it claimed…
