Readers will not be surprised on reading that the new Spanish Patent Act, which is due to come into force on 1 April 2017, establishes a remuneration right in favour of employees who have made an invention when their personal contribution and the importance of the invention clearly exceed the explicit or implicit contents of…
by Dr. André Sabellek In a recent judgment the Higher Regional Court of Düsseldorf (OLG Düsseldorf) had to deal with the application of the “Specific Mechanism” for parallel imports of pharmaceuticals if those pharmaceuticals are protected by a supplementary protection certificate (SPC) (judgment of August 6, 2015, court docket: 2 U 21/15 – Ezetimib, <http://www.duesseldorfer-archiv.de/?q=node/6461>)….
A patent holder’s application to reissue his patent with altered, broader claims was properly rejected by a patent examiner and the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office Patent Trial and Appeal Board based on the anticipation of the claims by prior art, according to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit (In re Taylor,…
The assessment of inventive step is a legal assessment which can be reviewed by the Supreme Court through what is known as the “cassational appeal”. The Supreme Court confirms the validity and suitability of the “problem-and-solution approach” to assess the inventive step requirement and that it is not sufficient that the expert in the field…
In an appeal from an opposition decision that maintained the patent, an EPO board refused to admit an auxiliary request that had been filed by the proprietor during opposition and formally re-entered with the initial response to the grounds of appeal. Other than implicitly through arguments about the main request, the response failed to take…
…well not really, but the German Federal Court of Justice has recently issued a decision (Kreuzgestänge, X ZR 103/13) that may expose Germany’s “Bifurcation System” to even more questions and criticism than in the past. Bifurcation is a term probably originating from geography and generally means “splitting of a main body into two parts”. An…
This month of October will fade away, leaving behind it the “Protocol to the Agreement on a Unified Patent Court on Provisional Application”, done at Brussels on 1 October 2015, the purpose of which – as its name suggests – is to provisionally apply Articles 1-2, 4-5, 6(1), 7, 10-19, 35(1, 3 and 4), 36-41…
By Jan Lindberg and Kiira Lehtonen About a year ago we had an exceptional case in Finland where Ranbaxy Laboratories Limited, Ranbaxy UK Limited and Ranbaxy Pharma AB (“Ranbaxy”) were awarded millions in damages in a case against Warner-Lambert Company LLC and Pfizer Oy (“Pfizer”), given in June last year (Helsinki District Court, case L…
On 19 October 2015 the Preparatory Committee of the UPC has adopted the final 18th draft of the Rules of Procedure (RoP) of the Unified Patent Court. This means that the Committee ends its work regarding the Rules of Procedure. There is only one subject that still needs to be included in the RoP and…
The Finnish Supreme Court held that the reversal of the burden of proof stipulated in Article 34 TRIPs as implemented in the Finnish Patent Act does not per se require a party to disclose its manufacturing process, but only to prove that it used a different process than that specified in the patent. The threshold…
