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…
The Federal Court of Justice held in the present case that it was not relevant whether it is possible to escape a declaration of nullity due to added matter under certain circumstances, as recently affirmed in FCJ X ZR 161/12 Wundbehandlungsvorrichtung, since the subject matter in dispute was directly and unambiguously derivable from the originally…
This case concerns the relationship between two co-owners of a patent and in particular the issue of whether and under what conditions one co-owner can claim compensation in respect of the use of the invention by the other co-owner. The FCJ held that an assessment of the potential claim of a co-owner for compensation for…
In a lengthy obiter dicta, the Barcelona Court of Appeal seems to depart from a longstanding assumption of Spanish law: that the mere continuance of the infringement (i.e. the presence of the infringing goods on the market) is per se enough to justify the urgent interest in the grant of a preliminary injunction. Rather, an…
The Unitary Patent and the Unified Patent Court are likely to boost trade and foreign direct investment (FDI) in the European Single Market for technology. This is one of the conclusions in an EPO report which was published on 14 November 2017. The study ‘Patents, trade and foreign direct investment in the European Union’, carried…
