» 2022

Patent pools

Patent pools, in brief, constitute an agreement between two or more patent holders who share their patents between themselves or with third parties. In this article we would like to introduce you to this issue, paying attention in particular to purposes for which patent pools are set up and to challenges related to their assessment from the point of view of anti-competition law. ...

Criminal sanctions in Polish Industrial Property Law

The importance of including all the inventors in the patent application cannot be overemphasized. This is the lesson that scientists from Broad University have learnt the hard way when the institution’s European patent EP2771468 for a groundbreaking CRISPR/Cas9 technology was invalidated by the EPO in 2018. The decision was handed on the grounds of the omission of Professor Luciano Maraffini...

Sequences of Genes as Inventions

In this article, we would like to discuss one of the issues that involves the patent law regulations in the area of biotechnology. Is it possible to grant a patent for a sequence of a gene? In other words, would it be possible to treat genes as inventions and if yes, then what conditions should be fulfilled for such a classification? The debate on this subject is full of controversies. At...

Unified Patent Court: Representation of Parties to Proceedings Before the Unified Patent Court

The launch of the Unified Patent Court (UPC) is quickly approaching. With 24 EU Member States within its jurisdiction, it will be exclusively competent in matters relating to validity and infringements of the European patents with unitary effects, European patents and supplementary protection certificates granted for inventions protected by such patents. We have previously indicated in our...

Licensing agreements and other technology transfer agreements and the competition law

As we can read in “Patent Law” by Professor Du Vall, the economic and social rationales behind the IP law and the competition law are to a considerable degree convergent: “they are supposed to contribute to ensuring benefits for consumers and the effective allocation of the means of production”. The relation between these two fields of law remains, however, rather complicated: the...

SPC Manufacturing Waiver

The subject of the supplementary protection certificate (SPC) has already been featured in a number of our publications. The essential basic information about SPC can be found in one of the first entries in our series “Patents Without Secrets” (No. 7/2020 — available only in Polish language). We have also covered for you the case-law of the CJEU clarifying the conditions for granting of...

Know-how: the protection of trade secrets

Know-how, technological knowledge developed by an enterprise in a particular field, is not protected under the industrial property law, and yet it might play a considerable role when it comes to keeping inventions safe from unauthorized use by third parties. In this article we will present you the definition of know-how, as well as a catalogue of claims that an entitled person can raise in case...

Patent linkage in the proposed amendment to the Polish Reimbursement Act

In Poland, the work on the amendment of The Act of 12 May 2011 on the Reimbursement of Medicines, Foodstuffs Intended for Particular Nutritional Uses and Medical Devices is currently in progress. The project developed by the Ministry of Health was published in the Public Information Bulletin of the Government Legislation Center on 30 June 2021. On the same day, an invitation to public...

The Unified Patent Court: Protective Letter

The preparations for the launch of the Unified Patent Court (UPC) are currently in progress. An international court that would be exclusively competent in matters of validity and infringements of unitary patents as well as European patents granted by the EPO, will start functioning in late 2022 or early 2023. The emergence of the UPC will dramatically change the landscape of industrial property...

Doctrine of Equivalents

In our previous article in the cycle “Patents Without Secrets” we discussed the available methods applied in interpretation of patent claims, pointing out to some characteristic discrepancies occurring between the manner of construing claims in the Polish legal system (the Act of 30 June 2020 - the Industrial Property Law (IPL)) and on the grounds of the Convention on the Grant of European...

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