Time is closing in on two of the most hotly debated issues of the Unitary Patent (UP) package: the level of the UP renewal fees and the distribution key for the partition of these fees between participating Member States. Work on the latter, politically highly sensitive, issue was launched at the 10th meeting of the…
Regular readers of the Kluwer patent blog may recall that in April 2014, the English Patents Court revoked two patents relating to trastuzumab, the active ingredient in Herceptin, which is marketed outside of the US by Roche. One patent was for a dosage regimen and the other related to a composition of trastuzumab containing certain…
Although Brian Cordery will try to have you believe that the title of this blog is borrowed from William Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night, it may well have been taken from the Report from the Commission to the Council and the European Parliament dated 14 July 2005 on Development and implications of patent law in the field…
The newly established 15th Patent Senate of the Appeals Court of Düsseldorf (Presiding Judge Dr. Ulrike Voß) has referred a number of questions concerning the calculation of damages in IP cases to the European Court of Justice. This opens the floor for the ECJ to talk about damages, as far as I know for the…
by Anne Katrin Schön On 12 June of this year, the German Federal Court of Justice (FCJ) in Karlsruhe concluded nullity appeal proceedings (X ZR 96/11) against the German part of European patent EP 1 071 556 B1 by dismissing the nullity action and upholding the patent as granted. Overruling the first-instance judgment 1 Ni…
The Preparatory Committee of the Unified Patent Court (UPC) is very satisfied with the opinion of the Advocate General (AG) of the European Court of Justice (CJEU) on the Spanish challenge. As chairman Paul van Beukering commented to Kluwer IP Law, ‘It couldn’t be much better than this.’ According to Van Beukering, the recent opinion…
The first actions of Spain and Italy against the decision of 25 EU member states to use the system of “enhanced cooperation” for the unitary patent package were rejected by the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) on 16 April 2013. One month earlier, Spain had launched on 22 March 2013 two new…
Software interoperability seems to be at the heart of any discussion to how to protect computer programs lately. Recent cases such as Oracle v. Google before the US Supreme Court, and SAS v. WPLtd before the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) have probably something to do with it. The truth is that…
As readers will no doubt be aware, earlier this year the Preparatory Committee of the Unified Patent Court (“UPC”) drew up a short-list of candidate Judges after selecting them from an overwhelming raft of more than 1300 applications. This author knows of at least one Spanish candidate Judge whose expression of interest was discarded on…
There are no disadvantages to the Unitary Patent package, as it is an optional system. Willem Hoyng, lawyer of Hoyng Monegier and member of the Legal and the Expert Panel of the UPC Preparatory Committee, wrote this in a paper made available to Kluwer IP News. If companies don’t want to put all their eggs…
