A post on the new guidelines for examination of the European Patent Office tops the list of most popular articles of the Kluwer Patent Blog in 2019. The enduring social problems at the EPO led to a…
One of the key questions in the assessment of inventive step within the EPO is whether or not the skilled person will adapt or modify the teaching of the closest prior art and arrive at the invention…
As the clock strikes midnight on 31 December 2019, we hope that the new Rules of Procedure of the Boards of Appeal (RPBA) will not be the first thing on our minds. Nevertheless, the beginning of this…
The PACTE law of May 22nd [1] introduced new opposition proceedings against French patents before the French PTO. A draft amendment to the Intellectual Property Code (hereinafter referred to as "IPC"…
Back to sad old days at the European Patent Office. Last Thursday, hundreds of EPO staff members protested outside the Portuguese Embassy in The Hague against the lack of justice and deteriorating…
Traveling back from an interesting and lively VPP meeting on a train at dawn through beautiful, lonesome parts of Germany, full of large forests hosting mythical creatures that made it into the fairy…
Bayer was not granted an injunction in preliminary proceedings because the Court found that there was a serious chance that Bayer’s patent would be held invalid. The fact that the patent had survived…
Times where a lot is written about matters of constitutional law are not necessarily good times. When the wheels of a state or state-like organization engage smoothly with each other and when…
While the EPO published a report late September about the importance of intellectual property rights for the European economy, internally meetings were held by EPO president António Campinos both…
