In September of 2013 the Spanish Patent and Trademark Office ("SPTO") published a draft Patents Act, which will hopefully be approved by Parliament within the next few months, assuming that the…
The English Patents Court (Birss J) recently demonstrated a somewhat unconventional approach to answering the statutory question of obviousness when assessing inventive step*. The judgment also…
The training of judges for the UPC will commence in the first quarter of 2015.
Willem Hoyng, member of the Expert Panel of the UPC Preparatory Committee, informed Kluwer IP Law that a group of 26 ET…
The juxtapositon of patent limitations in national nullity proceedings and before national patent offices on the one hand and according to article 105a EPC on the other hand is a hotly debated issue…
The doctrine of equivalence has seen some kind of renaissance in German case law recently. In short words, there are three questions to be asked to decide for equivalent infringement if there is no…
The machine translations provided by Google and the European Patent Organization have to improve considerably before the Czech Republic will ratify the UPC agreement.
Josef Kratochvil, president of…
Before diving into this year’s Oktoberfest with the Munich IP community, colleague contributor Thorsten Bausch summarized the German Federal Court of Justice’s case law of Summer 2014. As the days of…
On 12 September 2014, the Barcelona Court of Appeal (Section 15) handed down a decision confirming a preliminary injunction preventing a Spanish company from marketing capsules claimed to be…
As already described in a previous blog entry the Belgian Supreme Court nullified a decision of the Antwerp Court of Appeal granting a descriptive seizure (“beschrijvend beslag”; “saisie-description…
Will the upcoming Unified Patent Court be a success? Is opting-out most patents the best option when the new system starts functioning? How will IP litigators and practitioners see their work change…
