(Indirect) infringement, Antibodies, Biologics, Extension of subject matter, Inventive step, Pharma, Revocation, Scope of protection, Sufficiency of disclosure, United Kingdom, Validity

(Bristows)/

Case reported and summarized by Gregory Bacon, Bristows LLP Mr Justice Carr is only a few months into his judicial career, but having already provided welcome guidance on the role of plausibility in considering both the questions of inventive step and sufficiency (see earlier blog post on Actavis v Eli Lilly), he has now produced…

Injunction, Spain

(Clifford Chance)/

The Mobile World Congress (“MWC”) is one of the largest trade events taking place in Barcelona. Due to its importance, all relevant institutions, including regional and local governments, do their very best each year to help make the event as successful as possible. These efforts have resulted, for example, in the construction of a new…

European Union, Unitary Patent, UPC

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We are ready, are you? The ‘last steps’ towards the introduction of the Unitary Patent (UP) system were a recurring theme on the first day of the Unitary Patent Package Conference in Amsterdam. A  lot of experts and specialists who are closely involved in the creation of the UP and the Unified Patent Court (UPC)…

United States of America

(Wolters Kluwer Legal & Regulatory US)/

In finding that all of the claims of Cutsforth’s U.S. Patent No. 7,990,018 (“the ’018 patent”) were obvious in light of the prior art, the Patent Trial and Appeal Board erred in failing to explain its reasoning, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit has decided (Cutsforth, Inc. v. MotivePower, Inc., January 22,…

European Union, SPC, Unitary Patent, UPC

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The European Commission has taken the first step towards creating a European Supplementary Protection Certificate (SPC). A Call for Tender for a ‘Study on the legal aspects of the supplementary protection certificates in EU’ was published last month. The deadline for the Call for Tender is 4 February 2016. After signing a contract, the study…

Inventive step, Spain

(Clifford Chance)/

As readers well know, according to article 56 of the European Patent Convention “an invention shall be considered as involving an inventive step if, having regard to the state of the art, it is not obvious to a person skilled in the art.” In practice, the application of this article requires factual and legal assessments…

EPO, UPC

(Eubelius)/

On Friday 22 January 2016, the annual ERA (Academy of European Law) conference on the Unitary Patent took place in Brussels. Regarding the agreement reached on the renewal fees, Clemens Heusch, head of European litigation at Nokia, explained that although Nokia currently has more than 30,000 (!) patent families in its patent portfolio, he finds…