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…
European states lack awareness of their obligations under the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) and the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights and have established associations such as the EPO and the UPC, without anyone accounting for guarantees with regard to democracy, the rule of law and human rights. Professor Siegfried Broß said this in…
On 24 November 2016, the Court of Appeal of Barcelona (Section 15) handed down a judgment in which it confirmed that “the interpretation of the scope of protection of a patent for the purposes of analysing its validity cannot be different from when its infringement is analysed”. The Judges also highlighted the relevance of the…
In a dispute between patent holder B/E Aerospace and C&D Zodiac that was instituted by C&D’s petition for inter partes review of B/E’s patent for saving space in airplanes, the Patent trail and Appeal Board did not err in concluding that claims 1, 3–7, 9, 10, 12–14, 16–19, 21, 22, 24–29, 31, and 33–37 of…
