As readers may know from previous blogs, a new Patents Act (“Law 24/2015, of 24 July, of Patents”) is due to come into force in Spain on 1 April 2017. So we are almost there. In a nutshell, the new Patents Act seeks to improve the prestige of Spanish patents by abandoning the possibility of…
The new Visser is out The 24th edition of the book The Annotated European Patent Convention by Derk Visser has been published on 6 December 2016. The book is updated till 15 November 2016. A few important amendments in the book are: The changes in the latest edition of the Guidelines for Examination in the EPO, valid…
The festive season is almost upon us once again. Since many British and other European folk (not to mention our American cousins) are feeling somewhat exhausted by the political upheavals that 2016 has brought with it, the Kluwer patents team thought that there could be few better ways to take one’s mind off the current turmoil…
The appeal court is not prevented from denying the credibility of a witness affirmed in the first instance court if there are concrete indications that raise doubts about the correctness and completeness of the relevant findings of fact and if therefore the facts have to be appraised anew, but if the witness has passed away…
Purchasers of AstraZeneca LP’s heartburn medication Nexium were not entitled to a new trial to their challenge of “reverse payment” agreements between AstraZeneca and Ranbaxy Pharmaceuticals that allegedly blocked the entry of a generic version of the drug, the U.S. Court of Appeals in Boston has decided. The plaintiffs’ argument that the trial court improperly…
Whenever a patent holder fails to prove that the patent protection of a component, incorporated into a complex product, is not of subordinate importance to the basic functional characteristic of the good (in this case of vehicles, characterized as bringing passengers from one point to another safely), the doctrine of exhaustion applies, irrespective of where…
Depending on the outcome of the UK Government’s appeal to the Supreme Court on the issue of whether Parliament has to be consulted about the decision to give notice under Article 50 to leave the EU, the procedure which must lead to ratification of the Unified Patent Court Agreement could be the first case since…
There is a lot of enthusiasm among German patent judges, in particular but not only the younger ones, for the Unitary Patent system and the Unified Patent Court, according to Dr. Klaus Grabinski, Judge of the Federal Court of Justice of Karlsruhe in Germany. In an interview with Kluwer IP Law he welcomed the news…
On 25 November 2016 Italy’s ratification law of the UPC Agreement was published in the Official Gazette of the Italian Republic (Law no. 214 of 3 November 2016 – link to the Official Gazette here). The ratification law – which definitely puts an end to the hostility initially shown by the Italian government to the UPC…
What will happen if the United Kingdom, after ratifying the Unified Patent Court Agreement (UPCA) and some years of membership of the Unified Patent (UP) system, leaves the European Union? Can it continue to be a member of the system? If it doesn’t, what will happen to Unitary Patents that up to the Brexit were…
