‘It’s one big mess.’ At times Emil Pot, co-founder and general counsel of biopharmaceutical company ActoGenix, had difficulty containing his frustration at the Congress on the EU patent package, which took place at 17 October 2014 in Brussels. The issue: the discussion on determining the renewal fees of the future unitary patent (UP), and –…
Although more than 20 years have passed since the Enlarged Board of Appeal issued its decision G 1/92, there is still little case law which provides guidance on how to establish the structure and properties of a particular medicament in a manner so as to be able to rely on the same as a piece…
Since last week the prototype of the case management and efiling software for the Unified Patent Court is online for testing purposes. In Brussels, Paul Van Beukeringen (chairman of the preparatory committee) explained today that the purpose of the testing is to get as much feedback as possible from users on how this case management…
In September of 2013 the Spanish Patent and Trademark Office (“SPTO”) published a draft Patents Act, which will hopefully be approved by Parliament within the next few months, assuming that the election calendar so permits. During the last year, the draft has received numerous comments from the stakeholders concerned, including the Spanish competition authorities and…
The English Patents Court (Birss J) recently demonstrated a somewhat unconventional approach to answering the statutory question of obviousness when assessing inventive step*. The judgment also provides some guidance on the role of commercial as opposed to technical considerations, in particular regulatory concerns, when assessing obviousness. Leo Pharma, the defendant in these proceedings, market a…
The training of judges for the UPC will commence in the first quarter of 2015. Willem Hoyng, member of the Expert Panel of the UPC Preparatory Committee, informed Kluwer IP Law that a group of 26 ET judges (Eligible with Training) has been selected for the initial training course. However, this does not mean that they will also be…
The juxtapositon of patent limitations in national nullity proceedings and before national patent offices on the one hand and according to article 105a EPC on the other hand is a hotly debated issue not only in Switzerland. In a recently published decision of 2 June 2014 (4A_541/2013), the Swiss Federal Supreme Court had to decide –…
The doctrine of equivalence has seen some kind of renaissance in German case law recently. In short words, there are three questions to be asked to decide for equivalent infringement if there is no literal infringement. The first one being the question about the effect of the different solution. Do the means used to solve…
The machine translations provided by Google and the European Patent Organization have to improve considerably before the Czech Republic will ratify the UPC agreement. Josef Kratochvil, president of the Czech IPO Office, told Kluwer UPC News reporter that the language issue is the most serious problem the Czechs have with the patent package. It is…
