A niche blog dedicated to the issues that arise when supplementary protection certificates (SPCs) extend patents beyond their normal life -- and to the respective positions of patent owners, investors, competitors and consumers. The blog also addresses wider issues that may be of interest or use to those involved in the extension of patent rights. You can email The SPC Blog here

Friday 2 January 2009

Tour of Patent Offices - Germany

For the first posting in 2009, the SPC blog decided it was time to check out the scene in Germany.
Information about patent applications, patents, including status can be obtained from the register website of the German Patent Office (here, https://dpinfo.dpma.de/). Although there is an English language search mask, the results are posted in German. You can however click to a table containing a translation of the terms listed in the search results. The site may be rather slow during peak usage times and refuse to run your search.

The site does provide information on whether an SPC application was filed, but unfortunately, no information on the status of the SPCs can be obtained.

For those interested in reading up on German SPC case law, the website of the German Patent and Trade Mark Court is your place to look (that is, if you want it for free). You can search cases from 2003 onwards by date, case number and term. But a word of warning, you'll have to brush up your German because there isn't an English language site. If the case has gone up to the Federal Supreme Court, you can check out the pages of the Bundesgerichtshof for cases back to 2000. Here again, the site's in German.

Hopefully, short summaries of future cases will be published here in English, for those that don't have a grasp of the lovely language of Goethe.

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