Summer is here and the anticipated (but not yet actually arrived in the author’s personal experience) slow-down in activity may provide many Kluwer Patent Blog readers with the chance to draw breath and catch up on the latest UPC developments. But how well do you know the UPC? Could you list the location of all…
Competence of the Dutch courts is determined solely based on facts furnished by plaintiff. Jurisdiction for patent entitlement claims is governed by the Protocol on Recognition to the EPC, not by the Brussels I Regulation. A full summary of this case has been published on Kluwer IP Law.
Conflicts between patents and generic medicaments are mandatorily solved by arbitration. Requests of authorization to introduce generic medicaments in the market (AIM) are published by the Portuguese Medicaments Office (INFARMED) and interested parties have a term of 30 days to oppose their industrial property rights. Upon the termination of the term, patents cannot be enforced…
The statute which provides that holders of industrial property rights can resort only to arbitration instead of directly resorting to state courts concerning provisional or interim measures (Article 2 of Law No 62/2011 of 12 December) is not contrary to the Portuguese constitution. However, the statute according to which a patent cannot be enforced against…
The Patent and Trial Appeal Board erred in dismissing Airbus S.A.S.’s appeal for lack of jurisdiction based on a lack of substantial new question of patentability because the Director had already ordered inter partes reexamination, according to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit (Airbus S.A.S. v. Firepass Corporation, July 17, 2015, Lourie,…
By Kristian Fredrikson, Dephi and Jan Lindberg, Trust Ltd. This time I want to introduce a fellow author from Sweden, Kristian Fredrikson, who promised to write about this interesting recent decision from the Supreme Court (Högsta domstolen 18 June 2015, case no B6341-13). It does not concern patents per se but an infringer’s liability for…
Since the dismissal by the Court of Justice of the European Union of Spain’s actions on 5 May 2015 a number of positive decisions are coming from the unitary patent / UPC scene: 1) By the end of May, Italy had announced to be willing to become a “unitary patent member state”. Last week the…
No, not what you might perhaps have hoped for. A lot is currently ongoing at the European Patent Office about the status, the independence, the future location and the (self-)administration of the EPO’s Boards of Appeal, but this blogger is neither sufficiently well-informed nor competent to comment on the big picture. So let’s stick to…
The Dutch draft legislation to implement the Unitary Patent Package in the Netherlands includes an interesting ‘safety net’ provision. If registration of unitary effect of a European patent is rejected by the EPO and this is confirmed by the UPC (as the case may be), there will be a possibility to validate the patent in…
When defining the technical problem underlying an invention, it may not simply be assumed that the person skilled in the art needed to address a particular problem. On the contrary, the technical problem must be formulated so generally and neutrally that the question as to which incentives a person skilled in the art obtained from…
