A sweeping reform of the European Union’s legislation on supplementary protection certificates for medicinal products and plant protection products is currently underway, which features the introduction of a new centralized SPC examination procedure at the EUIPO as well as the creation of a new unitary SPC on the basis of the unitary patent, as previously…
A hefty judgment was recently handed down by Mellor J concerning a patent for a modified release formulation of mirabegron. The patent was held to be valid and not infringed by Sandoz, while infringement with respect to Teva (which had admitted infringement with an earlier version of its product but sought a declaration of non-infringement…
Nokia has started legal actions against Amazon in the US, Germany, India, the UK and at the Unified Patent Court for the unauthorized use of Nokia’s video-related technologies in streaming services and devices. Separately, Nokia filed cases in the US against HP. In a blogpost, Arvin Patel, chief licensing officer new segments at Nokia, states…
On the last day of the AIPPI World Congress in Istanbul, a packed-out room of attendees was treated to a UPC mock trial. The illustrious judging panel featured three UPC judges, with Edger Brinkman as Presiding Judge joined by Peter Tochtermann and Petri Rinkinen. The mock scenario concerned an application for a preliminary injunction (PI)…
The president of the UPC local division The Hague has allowed to change the language of the proceedings from Dutch to English in an infringement action of Plant-e Knowledge and Plant-e against Arkyne Technologies, because ‘the language initially chosen [was] significantly detrimental to the Applicant’. The order of president Florence Butin was issued on 18…
A recently published ruling of the Presidium of the Court for Intellectual Rights may turn the issue of cascading divisional applications upside down and endanger many patents granted on such applications. Background A divisional patent application is a separate one that is derived from an initial (parent) application. The necessity of filing such a divisional…
The Unitary Patent system is doing much better than expected, with almost 80 cases in the first six months and about 20-25% of new European patents converted to UPs, according to Paul England. He is senior counsel at Taylor Wessing and co-author of the Practitioner’s Guide to the Unified Patent Court and the Practitioner’s Guide…
The EPO and BRPTO are adopting the WIPO Standard ST.26 for the submission of sequence listings in national and international applications filed on or after July 1st, 2022. WIPO Standard ST.26 establishes new rules for the presentation of biological sequences in extensible markup language (XML). This format has many advantages over the former ST.25 (TXT)…
An earlier post on case law on Standard Essential Patents (SEPs) in India looked at decisions published until 2021. This very comment updates the analysis by covering more recent cases occurred in the latest two years, specifically focusing on the availability of interim injunctive relief for SEP owners and FRAND terms. In the recent proceedings…
A recent letter by the EPO’s Central Staff Committee (CSC) about Rewarding quality in the core business is too important and far too well-written to remain unnoticed. Perhaps unsurprisingly, it confirms the reality of the problems addressed in my earlier posts, e.g. (1), (2) and elsewhere. Despite its uplifting title “50 years EPC – Rewarding…
