To ensure you don’t miss out on interesting IP law developments reported on our other IP blogs, we will, on a regular basis, provide you with an overview of the top 3 most-read posts from each of our IP law blogs. Here are the top posts from September, October and November. Top 3 Kluwer Copyright…
Yesterday was St. Nicholas Day in Germany and many other European Countries. As Wikipedia helpfully as always explains, St. Nicholas fills the boot with gifts and sweets overnight, and at the same time checks up on the children to see if they were good, polite and helpful the last year. If they were not, they…
Despite uncertainty about the UK’s post-Brexit position in the Unitary Patent (UP) system and the German constitutional compliant against the Unified Patent Court Agreement (UPCA), several steps leading towards UK ratification of the UPCA have been taken over the last weeks. The House of Commons approved the draft Unified Patent Court (Immunities and Privileges) Order…
Whilst many in show business have long lived by the adage “never work with children or animals” for fear of what might ensue, patent litigators in the UK have long been known to take a similar approach to experiments, avoiding them if at all possible for fear of the results. Indeed, Laddie J noted once…
As readers know well, AgrEvo (T 939/92) is a landmark case in the history of European patent law. In this case, an EPO’s Board of Appeal found the patent to meet the “sufficiency” requirement because all the compounds could be made. On the contrary, it found the patent to lack inventive step. The reason was…
EPO president Benoit Battistelli has strengthened the overall position of the European Patent Organisation, but the social problems cloud these achievements. Christoph Ernst, chairman of the EPO Administrative Council (AC), has said this in an interview with the German legal website JUVE. According to Ernst, who has been AC member for years and succeeded Jesper…
Few would dispute that the Actavis v Eli Lilly decision from the Supreme Court in July 2017 represented – for better or for worse – a major change to the scope of protection of patents in the UK. Four months on, the dust is beginning to settle a little and we now have a handful…
Ahead of the meeting of the EU Competitiveness Council, 30 November and 1 December 2017 in Brussels, a group of European companies and associations have sent a letter to EU member states urging them to ratify the Unified Patent Court Agreement and join the Protocol on Provisional Application (PPA) as soon as possible, if they…
Three pending cases have the potential to reshape – or even eliminate – inter partes review, a procedure for challenging patent validity introduced by the 2011 America Invents Act (“AIA”). On November 27, the Supreme Court will hear oral argument in two of those cases. In Oil States Energy Services, LLC v. Greene’s Energy Group,…
When a company is not prepared to charge a socially acceptable price in the Netherlands for a medicine, the government should use other instruments such as compulsory licences, encouraging pharmacy preparation and allowing patients to order medicinal products abroad in order to ensure that the medicine is available for patients. The Dutch Council for Public…
