» Legal Reports

What is permitted under the TRIPS Agreement when it comes to the scarcity of SARS-CoV-2 vaccines?

In last December we published an issue of our Legal Report concerning the legal aspects of development of vaccines against the SARS-CoV-2 virus. We wrote in it about the race of pharmaceutical companies — at that moment back then only several weeks had passed since Moderna and Pfizer submitted first motions for emergency authorisations of their products and the optimistic news about...

New guidelines published by the President of the Polish Patent Office

In October 2020 the Polish Patent Office (PPO) published the latest version of the President’s guidelines regarding inventions and utility models. The guidelines elaborate quite often on certain matters that are not expressly addressed in relevant statuary and executive provisions, they suggest possible directions for interpretation of binding law, and specify numerous formal and technical...

Patent rights: an obstacle for development of a vaccine against COVID-19?

Recently we have been anxiously following a race of major pharmaceutical concerns: who would be the first to develop an effective vaccine against COVID-19? On 8 November Pfizer announced that their vaccine has an effectivity rate of 90%; just a week later Moderna "outbid" it, boasting 94,5% effectivity rate of their product. The dominant narrative emphasizes the common effort of the whole...

First filing requirement in Poland

Many states adopt in their legislation certain limitations when it comes to permissibility of filing patent applications before foreign offices: usually they are imposed on citizens of those countries or their residents; they can apply as well to inventions developed within their territories. Such regulations of given states provide that the first filing for an invention must take place with...

The claim to increase a remuneration for an employee’s invention in the Polish legal system

Quite often our Clients approach us with questions concerning the regulations of renumeration for employees’ inventions in the Polish legal system, particularly in the context of the claim under Article 23 of the Act of June 30, 2020 on Industrial Property Law (from now on as IPL). In this issue of the WTS Legal Report we would like to provide you with a detailed overview of this matter,...

The judgment of the CJEU in the Santen case: A new medical use of an existing product and an SPC eligibility

When it comes to conditions of the grant of a supplementary protection certificate (SPC), we covered this matter in our previous Legal Report that was published over summer. We indicated that issues related to SPCs are a subject of extensive, continuously expanding caselaw of the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU). Whereas the last time we focused on the decision of April 30, 2020 in...

The conditions for granting an SPC: a product is covered by patent claims if it was identifiable at a filing date (the judgment of the CJEU in Royalty Pharma case)

The conditions for granting a supplementary protection certificate (SPC) laid down in the EU law quite often raise some serious doubts and notoriously cause problems in practice. The Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) has frequently presented its position on that matter: the judgment in the case C-650/17 Royalty Pharma Collection Trust against Deutsches Patent- und Markenamt of April...

Deposit of Biological Materials

In this issue of the WTS Legal Report we would like to discuss a matter of great practical significance: Polish and international regulations concerning the deposit of biological materials. One of the grounds on which the Polish Patent Office can make a decision refusing patent protection is insufficient disclosure of an invention (Article 49 Section 1(2) of Act of June 30, 2000 on Industrial...

Blog