Readers will recall that, in its judgment of 6 October 2015 (Case C-471/14, Seattle Genetics), the CJEU concluded that the relevant date for calculating the term of a supplementary protection…
One of the drawbacks of a fragmented patent litigation system in Europe is the existence of contradictory judgments on exactly the same question from Courts of different European countries.
The most…
As readers know well, AgrEvo (T 939/92) is a landmark case in the history of European patent law. In this case, an EPO's Board of Appeal found the patent to meet the "sufficiency" requirement because…
In a lengthy obiter dicta, the Barcelona Court of Appeal seems to depart from a longstanding assumption of Spanish law: that the mere continuance of the infringement (i.e. the presence of the…
When the Kingdom of Spain joined what were then called the European Communities (the "EC") in 1986, it had to approve a new Patents Act which sought to adapt Spain's patent law to the standards…
During the past decade, Spanish courts have debated the impact of the TRIPS Agreement ("TRIPS") on patents the applications of which were filed before 7 October 1992, that is, before Spain's…
In a Judgment dated 12 June 2013, the Spanish Supreme Court confirmed that it was possible to discriminate between different objective technical problems within the same set of claims. Accordingly,…
On 24 November 2016, the Court of Appeal of Barcelona (Section 15) handed down a judgment in which it confirmed that "the interpretation of the scope of protection of a patent for the purposes of…
For the first time, the Spanish Supreme Court made far-reaching observations on key issues of the assessment of inventive step and, in particular, on a) the reformulation of the "objective technical…
A judgment of 13 July 2017 from the Spanish Supreme Court (Civil Chamber) has highlighted the importance of taking the fine pencil when examining novelty.
The decision stemmed from a judgment of 12…
