The SUEPO, the biggest trade union at the European Patent Organisation, filed a complaint against The Netherlands before the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) on 8 May 2017. According to the SUEPO, as host to one of the main offices of the European Patent Office, The Netherlands should have acted to end the breach…
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 March and April. Top 3 Kluwer Copyright Blog…
On April 3, 2017, the latest decision was handed down in the patent revocation battle between medical device manufacturer Nouvag and Jean Malak, a plastic surgeon specialized in liposuction. This conflict has taken on epic proportions, in part because of the ruling rendered by the Belgian Supreme Court on February 3, 2012 confirming that the…
Pharmaceutical polymorph patents are regarded as effective means and important secondary pharmaceutical patents to extend the life cycle of pharmaceutical patent protection. However, the inventiveness evaluation criteria for pharmaceutical polymorph patents have become much stricter in China while the amount of patent application keeps soaring. The clinical research of pharmaceutical polymorphs commenced in 1950s internationally…
To the extent that the Patent Trial and Appeal Board did not provide an explanation for its obviousness rejection of 13 claims of a Securus patent on a system and method for reviewing monitored conversations and identifying items of interest, the ruling was vacated and remanded by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal…
An EPO board of appeal expressed its opinion that EBA case law implied that no further use should be made of the three-part “essentiality test” of T 331/87, for deciding whether removal of a feature from a claim complies with article 123(2) EPC. The only test endorsed by the EBA was the “gold standard”. The…
In this case, the Federal Court of Justice considered the value of a secondary indicium for a decision on inventive step. The FCJ confirmed that if an invention differs from the decades-old general practice in the relevant technical field, then this may be an auxiliary criterion supporting inventive step. A full summary of this case…
A board of appeal of the European patent office held that a decision to reject an opposition with grounds based on an improperly corrected version of the patent as granted maintains the text used in the decision to grant, without the corrections. A decision of the examining division to correct the text after grant by…
In the past decade, a new character of the patent theatre has made inroads into the case law of some EU Member States, “imported” from the so-called “EPO case law”. Its name is “plausibility”. The origin of the plausibility concept can be traced to Decision T 939/92 (AgrEvo), where the EPO’s Board of Appeals held…
The UK Parliament closed down for business yesterday, preceding the general elections of 8 June 2017. It means parliamentary approval of legislation which is necessary for UK ratification of the Unified Patent Court Agreement will be delayed. Inevitably, this will lead to postponement of the start of the Unitary Patent system as well. After earlier…
