EPC

The European Patent Office and representatives of the 38 Member States organised a meeting last week of the Committee on Patent Law to discuss next steps following decision T 1063/18 of an EPO Board…

Visser's Annotated Patent Convention, the 2018 Edition, previously known as the Annotated European Patent Convention, was published on 15 December 2018. The new 2018 edition of this preeminent work –…

The EPO’s Problem-Solution-Approach is, on the face of it, simple and widely applied also in the national jurisprudence of the EPC member states. It starts with the determination of a “closest prior…

The much awaited decision T 1063/18 by Technical Board of Appeal 3.3.04 in a five-member composition has been published today. The patent application under appeal related to new pepper plants and…

The European Patent Office (EPO) is receiving ever increasing numbers of patent applications that include a ‘programmed computer’ as a key part of the described invention.  Moreover, this growth in…

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…

by Adam Lacy and Thorsten Bausch As European patent professionals are all too aware, the Boards of Appeal of the EPO (BOA) have a huge amount of power, particularly over the rights of patentees. In…

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…

Setting the record straight concerning the right to dependent claims under the EPC by Thomas Wyder and Stephan Steinmüller (Hoffmann Eitle) EPO Examiners sometimes urge Applicants to delete dependent…