Agreement on Community Patent (?)

Update: For the latest news, see here and here.

The according to the latest news here (DPA via Focus online), van Rompuy's Solomonic proposal to split the Unified European Patent Court into three parts - the central division being located in Paris and two other divisions in London and Munich respectively has been adopted. If this is true, this amounts to a great breakthrough in the 40-years of history of negotiations on the EU patent.

Further, according to this source, the London branch will deal with the administrative matters and the substantive jurisdiction will be distributed based on the technical field over the 3 cities.

Reasonable Expectation of Success? BGH "Calcipotriol-Monohydrat"

A skilled person trying to asses Germany's expectation of
success in today's semifinals.

The Federal Supreme Court (BGH) has spent much effort in further developing the case-law on the inventive step in the last months. The mantra is that the skilled person has to find an incentive (Anregung)  to tacke certain technical measures departing from the "beaten tracks", i.e. the usual way of doing things.

The decision  BGH X ZR  98/09 "Calcipotriol-Monohydrat" seeks to clarify the degree of intensity of this incentive in the prior art and adopts - according to this blogger's knowlege for the first time - the notion of a "reasonable expectation of success" needed for the skilled person do do certain experiments. This notion is widely used in the case law of the EPO Technical Boards of Appeal and goes back to T 60/89, 3.2.5.

According to the BGH, the consideration whether or not the adoption of certain measurs described in the prior art may for solving the technical problem under consideration "may gain in importance" when assessing whether or not the skilled person had an incentive to adopt these measures.