The search for a successor of Benoît Battistelli as president of the European Patent Organisation has started in full with the publication of a vacancy notice on the EPO website. It is obvious from the text that the controversial Battistelli, whose term in office ends in June 2018, has no chances to stay on. According…
The Court of Intellectual Property has exclusive jurisdiction to revoke patents. The mandatory arbitration court established by Law 62/2011 cannot declare the nullity of a pharmaceutical patent even if the issue is raised merely as a defence and with effects limited to the parties to the proceedings. A full summary of this case has been…
In relation to a patent that protected the interaction of a key and a cylinder in order to constitute a security locking system, the Barcelona Court of Appeal (Section 15) handed down a Judgment on 14 July 2016 in which it declared that the Defendant had directly infringed this patent by reproducing one of the…
One of the most controversial issues relating to Standard-Essential Patent (“SEP”) is to determine whether injunctive relief is available to SEP holders. Undoubtedly, in negotiation with a standard implementer, injunction is the most powerful weapon for an SEP holder, and will exert significant influence on the final license terms. Consequently, the court’s attitude towards SEP…
Decisions by the Patent Trial and Appeal Board in three interference proceedings between Stanford University and the Chinese University of Hong Kong (“CUHK”)—in which the Board found that methods of testing for fetal aneuploidies in DNA samples drawn from maternal blood were unpatentable for lack of written description—have been vacated by the U.S. Court of…
The European Patent Office amends its Regulations in order to exclude from patentability plants and animals exclusively obtained by an essentially biological breeding process. The decision, during the 152st meeting of the Administrative Council of the EPO, came after years of discussion and decisions to the contrary by the Enlarged Board of Appeal in the so-called Broccoli-II…
Chairman Alexander Ramsay of the Preparatory Committee of the Unified Patent Court regrets that a constitutional complaint has led to the suspension of the German ratification process of the UPC Agreement. In a message which was published on the committee’s website today, Ramsay states: ‘In Germany another layer of complexity has been added due to…
No doubt, one of the patentability requirements which is more difficult to examine is inventive step. Unlike other requirements, which call for a more objective analysis, inventive activity requires a subjective judgment, that is, whether the invention would have been obvious to a person skilled in the art. Taking into account that, inevitably, inventive activity…
By Alan Johnson and Luke Maunder, Bristows There is a lot of talk about the consequences of an ineffective opt-out, but concentrating on this issue perhaps ignores a more basic one: can anyone even challenge an opt-out? For those who wish to delve into the depths of legal analysis, a treatise on the issue may…
The 30-day period to initiate mandatory arbitration proceedings against apllicants of authorization to introduce generic medicines in the market is an expiration or final term. A full summary of this case has been published on Kluwer IP Law
