EPO

Australia, Case Law, Litigation, Patents, Pharma, Pharmaceutical patent, Plausibility, Sufficiency of disclosure, Validity

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Two recent decisions in the UK and Australia in the long-running pregabalin litigations demonstrate the different approaches in these jurisdictions to determine if a patent specification has sufficiently disclosed an invention.  Readers will recall that the judgments concerned Warner-Lambert’s Swiss-style claims for the use of the compound pregabalin (marketed as Lyrica) in the treatment of…

Brexit, EPO, European Union, Unitary Patent, UPC

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What were the most popular articles of the Kluwer Patent Blog in 2018? A look at the list shows that – even more strongly than in previous years – one topic drew more readers than anything else: the functioning of European Patent Office. Episodes of last year’s series on the EPO by Thorsten Bausch –…

EPO

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The European Patent Office has opened an online consultation on the possibility of allowing more flexibility in the timing of the examination process by offering means to postpone the examination of European patent applications. The reasons for the consultation are explained on the EPO’s website: ‘Since the launch of the Early Certainty initiative in 2014,…

EPO, Guidelines, Inventive step, Opposition

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The number of inventive step attacks in opposition procedures at the European Patent Office may be constrained in the future due to a recent change in the EPO Guidelines. According to David Brophy, partner at FRKelly, the change will improve efficiency, although the restrictions may also open up a new avenue for criticising decisions on…

EPC, EPC, EPO Decision, Exceptions to patentability, Guidelines, Plant variety

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The European Patent Office ‘will consider possible next actions’ together with the EPO Member States after a high-profile decision of a Board of Appeal earlier this week, concerning the patentability of plants. In case T 1063/18, the BoA decided that EPC Rules which were introduced by the EPO Administrative Council in 2017 to exclude plants…

EPC, EPC, EPO Decision, Exceptions to patentability, Guidelines, Plant variety

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Plants which are produced according to essentially biological processes need to be held patentable, despite EPO Guidelines which were introduced in 2017 to exclude them from patentability. The EPO Board of Appeal came to this remarkable decision earlier today in case T 1063/18. By Frits Michiels and Bart van Wezenbeek Those who thought that the…

EPC, EPO

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The Administrative Council of the European Patent Office must act and support president António Campinos in initiatives to end ‘the persistent atmosphere of intimidation’ at the EPO. That is the message of a letter which was sent to the heads of delegation of the Administrative Council (AC) earlier this week by the EPO-FLIER Team, ‘a…

EPO, Exceptions to patentability, Guidelines, Plant variety

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For the first time, the European Patent Office has revoked a patent as a consequence of amended regulations which exclude plants and animals obtained by an essentially biological breeding process for patentability. The revocation, last month, concerned European patent number 1.597.965, covering a type of broccoli adapted to make harvesting easier. The patent was granted…

EPC, EPO

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The European Patent Office and representatives of 14 German law firms who had expressed concerns about EPO patent quality earlier this year in a letter, have started a “constructive dialogue”. The representatives had a meeting with the new President of the European Patent Office, António Campinos, and other EPO officials, on 16 October 2018 in…