Posted: December 20th, 2017
EPO, Enlarged Board of Appeal, decision of December 18, 2017 in case G 1/16 – Disclaimer III, to be published in OJ EPO In its decision T 437/14 (OJ EPO 2017, A50), Technical Board of Appeal 3.3.09 had referred 3 questions to the Enlarged Board of Appeal (EBA) concerning the proper standard to be applied […]
READ MOREPosted: October 12th, 2017
EPO, Technical Board of Appeal 3.3.01, T 1150/15, decision of October 11, 2017 – Merck & Co., Inc. v. SHIONOGI & CO., LTD The grant of a compulsory license under § 24 of the German Patent Act was a legal instrument of hardly any relevance over many decades. Only once, the Federal Patent Court (BPatG) […]
READ MOREPosted: July 3rd, 2017
Biological inventions – protection of the products of essentially biological processes – Administrative Council overrules the Enlarged Board of Appeal – Decision CA/D 6/17 In its decision G 2/12 – Broccoli II (OJ EPO 2016, A27), the Enlarged Board of Appeal decided that product claims directed to plants or plant material are not excluded from […]
READ MOREPosted: June 30th, 2017
EPO clarifies practice in the area of plant and animal patents, EPO Statement, 29 June 2017 “On a proposal of the European Patent Office its Administrative Council took a decision to amend the relevant Regulations in order to exclude from patentability plants and animals exclusively obtained by an essentially biological breeding process. “The proposal from […]
READ MOREPosted: March 28th, 2017
European Patent Office, Technical Board of Appeal 3.2.05, T 577/11, decision of April 14, 2016, not to be published in OJ EPO – Entitlement to priority Headnotes 1 and 2 of the reported decision deal with the procedural aspect of admitting new submissions in second oral proceedings, headnotes 3 and 4 read as follows: 3. […]
READ MOREPosted: November 30th, 2016
EPO, Enlarged Board of Appeal, decision of November 29, 2016 in case G 1/15, to be published in OJ EPO In its decision T 557/13, Technical Board of Appeal 3.3.06 had referred 5 questions to the EBA concerning partial priorities and toxic divisional applications. The first and most fundamental point of law was related to […]
READ MOREPosted: November 23rd, 2016
EPO, Technical Board of Appeal 3.5.07, T 2440/12 “Fluid flow simulation/SIMCON”, decision of September 15, 2015, unpublished in OJ EPO – Moldflow Pty Ltd v. SIMCON GmbH A software product sold before the priority date of a patented computer-implemented method and admittedly executing said method when run anticipates the method by public prior use even […]
READ MOREPosted: November 3rd, 2016
EPO, Technical Board of Appeal 3.3.09, T 437/14, decision of October 17, 2016, to be published in OJ EPO – The Trustees of Princeton University et al. v. Merck Patent GmbH et al. The reported decision referred the following point of law to the Enlarged Board of Appeal (EBA): 1. Is the standard referred to […]
READ MOREPosted: July 27th, 2016
AMBA comments on the decisions of the Administrative council of June 30, 2016 and their effects on the independence of the Boards of Appeal – New location for the Boards of Appeal outside Munich In its June meeting, the Administrative Council (AC) adopted the proposals of the President of the EPO on the structural reform […]
READ MOREPosted: July 4th, 2016
Structural Reform of the Boards of Appeal of the EPO, Post-retirement restrictions for Board members Whereas the decisions of the Administrative Council on the structural reform of the Boards of Appeal (BOA) are not yet published on the EPO’s website, the blogs have made available after doc. CA/43/16 Rev. 1 (see post dated July 1, […]
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