Bolivia’s industrial property law, Decision No. 486 of the Andean Community, contains an article that defines what cannot be patented. This article 20 b) is currently the subject of controversy due to Bolivian Patent Office’s interpretation thereof. Article 20 b) establishes that not patentable are: (b) inventions the commercial exploitation of which in the member…
On 19 July 2024, the Court of Appeal handed down its judgment in Comptroller – General of Patents, Designs and Trade Marks v Emotional Perception AI Limited [2024] EWCA Civ 825 following a hearing on 14-15 May 2024. The Court of Appeal judgment overturns the first instance decision of the High Court and upholds the…
This is an open letter directed to the President of the EPO in his capacity to give directions on the composition of Opposition Divisions. Article 19 EPC explicitly permits the Primary Examiner to be member of an Opposition Division. Many applicants and representatives, however, have a feeling of bias in favour of the patentee before…
The question of the role that UPC is likely to play in relation to SEPs (and therefore FRAND licenses) is one that I’ve heard most often since the new jurisdiction was born, certainly because the main aim of the UPC is to harmonize hitherto fragmented patent litigation in Europe, notably to improve legal certainty. However,…
A recent decision from Joanna Smith J dealing with the costs of a withdrawn application in a case before the English Patents Court contains an important postscript and suggests that the rules in the Patents Court Guide regarding the lodging and filing of skeleton arguments need to be revisited. All English patent litigators, and many…
This week we reported on the case between Huawei and Netgear, in which the defendant had obtained a production order for a comparable license granted by Huawei to Qualcomm, the production of which Netgear had obtained via a decision of the Munich local division on 24 April 2024. It is interesting to note that this…
On 15 July 2024, the High Court of England and Wales handed down its decision ([2024] EWHC 1815 (Ch)) in the jurisdiction challenge in Telsa’s case against InterDigital and Avanci which considers a request for declaratory relief in relation to the FRAND terms for a patent pool licence that includes SEPs owned by multiple proprietors. …
Like a time machine, we began yesterday by examining the first revocation decision issued by the Munich Central Division on 16 July (see here), today we’ll be looking back at another earlier case, in which the Düsseldorf local division granted UPC’s first permanent injunction on 3 July. Note that this case has already been brilliantly…
On 16 July 2024, the Munich Central Division revoked a patent for the first time in the litigation between Sanofi, Regeneron, and Amgen (UPC_CFI_1/2023). This decision is important not only because it is the first of its kind, but also because it establishes UPC’s position on the patentability of therapeutic antibody inventions. In this case,…
This morning, the Barcelona Appeal Court has announced a judgment of 18 July 2024, reversing the judgment of 15 January 2024 from Commercial Court number 4 of Barcelona, which had found patent EP 1,427,415 (“EP ‘415”), protecting apixaban, to be invalid. The main highlights of the decision may be summarized as follows: The first interesting…
