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As reported in Managing IP, the Competition Council of the European Union has recently agreed on a set of conclusions on an enhanced patent system in Europe. The main features of the system include an EU patent to be granted under the provisions of the European Patent Convention, that is by the EPO, as well as a European and EU Patents Court (EEUPC).

From December 18 2009 the Patents Act, Section 3, third subsection 5, states that the exclusive right obtained by a patent does not include "trials, experiments and similar of a patented medicine that are required to obtain a marketing authorisation for a medicine in a state that is a contracting party to the agreement of 15 April 1994 on the establishment of the World Trade Organisation".

Countries from the Association of Southeast Asian Nations have embarked on their first regional cooperation in intellectual property, specifically in patents, by introducing ASEAN Patent Examination Cooperation (ASPEC). There are eight participating IP offices from: Cambodia, Indonesia, Laos, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand and Vietnam. Once a search and examination report is issued by any of these countries, the applicant may use the report to file an ASPEC request in another member state. The report from the first IP Office will be used as a reference. However, the second IP Office is not obliged to adopt any of the findings or conclusions made by the first IP Office. At the moment, there is no additional fee to file ASPEC Request.

Last November the European Parliament unanimously adopted a resolution to introduce the compulsory labelling of the mark "Made In" to indicate the origin of goods imported into the European Union.

Article 29 of Law 3784/09 revises the provisions of the Unfair Competition Act regarding the limitations period for unfair competition claims.

On December 13 2009, the CNNIC, the regulator of the .cn TLD, issued an urgent notice. The gist of the notice was that beginning at 9am on December 14 2009, no individuals are qualified to register a domain name. A domain name applicant is also required to submit a copy of the business licence (or a business bar code certificate) to the domain name registrar.

During patent opposition proceedings before the German Patent and Trade Mark Office or an appellate court the opponent may sometimes wish to be substituted. In present legal practice a successful substitution of the opponent requires, inter alia, that the "sphere of interest" be transferred from the former opponent to the new opponent. However, correctly determining the scope of this sphere of interest may result in complex and lengthy legal proceedings.

Because pharmaceutical companies perform time-consuming clinical trials before receiving a marketing authorisation (MA) to put a product on the market, the protection offered by pharmaceutical product patents is often reduced by five to 10 years. This reduces the benefits from an IP monopoly.

Austrian rules on remuneration for inventions made by employees are in several aspects quite different to those in Germany. Two of them are highlighted here.

In our previous columns we have emphasised the importance of exercising duty of candour in the prosecution and preparation of patent applications in Canada. In Ratiopharm Inc v Pfizer Limited, Mister Justice Hughes was very critical of "self-serving" statements in patent applications and found a patent invalid partly on the basis that the invention failed to live up to its claims of being "outstanding" and "markedly better than prior art compounds". In Lundbeck v Ratiopharm (2009), Madam Justice Mactavish revisited the duty of candour during prosecution and held a patent invalid despite the fact that the applicants had expressly drawn a particular piece of prior art to the examiner's attention and despite the fact that she considered the invention was neither anticipated by it nor obvious over it. Her rationale was that the applicants made the general statement that the prior art as a whole taught away from combining two compounds, whereas that was not true of the particular reference in question. This underscores the need to consider the impact of each known reference before making any sweeping generalisations in submissions to the examiner.