For many Americans the term “patent” is linked to a sense of tradition and cultural icons such as Thomas Edison, inventor of the operational incandescent light bulb. The very image of the light bulb itself has become a symbol for invention or a good idea.¹ Another commonly held notion is that a patent guarantees an individual protection from having his or her idea stolen by unscrupulous co…
In a recent patent infringement case between Servier and Apotex, courts in the UK were asked to look into the validity of a pharmaceutical patent that claimed a particular crystalline form of a compound called perindopril. Perindopril is a pharmaceutical compound essentially used to treat hypertension. Its preparation and use had been disclosed in a prior patent. The patent in the referred …
“Inventions, their exploitation, and the related prior art being inherently scientific and technical in nature, have a proclivity for recordation of information directed to their development, particulars of construction, modification, and application in documents.”¹ In fact, documents, tangible items and processes embody the most vital evidence available for proving patent validity and inf…
The greatest possible freedom’ is a formula which originated in the very first preliminary ruling of the Court of Justice of the European Union in social security, the judgment inHoekstra, 1964. Ever since then, the Court has regularly relied on this formula, most recently inDumont, 2013. The evolution and the power of formulas like ‘the greatest possible freedom’ are the topic of this bo…
Whether it is a question of the age below which a child cannot be held liable for their actions, or the attribution of responsibility to defendants with mental illnesses, mental incapacity is a central concern for legal actors, policy makers, and legislators when it comes to crime and justice. Understanding the terrain of mental incapacity in criminal law is notoriously difficult; it involves t…
Intellectual Property rights are expanding and, thus, overlapping more than ever before. This poses challenges to a system devised as comprising a set of isolated compartments, each with its defined purpose.The diverging rules concerning ownership and entitlement can lead to different rights on the same object being owned by different persons. What happens then? This question is addressed under…
This book contains some of the papers that were presented at the first meeting of the newly formed African Expert Study Group on International Criminal Law / Groupe des Experts Africaines en Droit Pénal International held in September 2011 in Brussels, Belgium. The group was established under the auspices of the Multinational Development Policy Dialogue (hereinafter ‘MDPD’) and the Rule of…
The right to old-age pension benefits is enshrined in a litany of constitutional and international rights. The aim of chapter three is to explore the protection of this right by outlining the respective legal provisions that address the right to pension entitlements. The role of the Greek Constitution and wider international law in protecting this right becomes even more important in instances …
This book discusses the implications of the 2009 EU Commission’s Pharmaceutical Sector Inquiry on originator’s opportunities to apply Intellectual Property related measures in defending against generic competition. It argues that on the one hand recent developments in EU competition law do indeed impose potential limitations on an originator’s ability to block or delay generic market entr…
How did the implementation of the EU Enforcement Directive on IP rights, which was adopted just before the expansion of the EU in May 2004, affect new EU Member States? This monograph is focused on three Baltic countries (Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia) and is aimed to present the collected information on the most relevant historic, social, economic and legal factors of those countries and to ex…