Three members of the ABG Intellectual Property team participated in the recent edition of Patent Mondays, held at the Spanish Patent and Trademark Office (SPTO) headquarters in Madrid. These sessions, organised by Pascual Segura, are one of the few advanced-level Industrial Property training sessions in Spain and are part of the activities carried out by the University of Barcelona’s “Patent Centre”.
20 November marked the start of the programme kicked off by Beatriz García Morillo, European Patent Attorney with ABG IP’s Department of Engineering, Physics & Information Technologies, and Agustín Alconada, ABG Intellectual Property partner with the Department of Biotechnology and fellow European Patent Attorney. Together they gave a presentation titled “Medical devices: challenges and particularities in their patent protection”.
Patentability of medical devices
Throughout their talk, both specialists analysed the different obstacles that must be overcome when using patents to protect inventions in medical devices, the nature of which can be multidisciplinary and combine different areas of engineering, chemistry and biology. In this vein, they mentioned that when drafting the patent application, depending on the invention, legal exceptions related to medical or diagnostic uses may apply, in addition to other restrictions related to “computer-implemented inventions”, among other matters.
In their presentation, Agustín Alconada and Beatriz García discussed potential situations using real cases and spoke with the attendees about the respective decisions made by the European Patent Office in this regard.
Patents in China
After a short break, it was time for Iain McGeoch, head of ABG IP Euskadi, to speak. The European Patent Attorney thoroughly explained the Chinese patent system from both a historical and a purely legal perspective.
Among other matters, Iain McGeoch focused on aspects and precautions that must be taken into account in this country both from a procedural and a substantive point of view, such as patent extensions, the intentional delay of processing times, the figure of the utility model, or the provision of experimental data during the application procedure.
McGeoch also analysed whether, following the different measures implemented in China over the last decade, this country’s negative reputation in the field of patents is still justified.
After the midday break, European Patent Attorneys and partners of ZBM Patents & Trademarks, Noemí Daviu and Montserrat Jané, gave the presentation titled “Are the unitary patent (UP) and the Unified Patent Court (UPC) meeting expectations? A review after six months in operation”.
For more information about Patent Mondays, click here.
