Lithuanian Kirin Amgen ECJ reference: a local lawyer comments

Readers will recall the recent ruling of the Court of Justice of the European Union in Case C‑66/09, Kirin Amgen Inc. v Lietuvos Respublikos valstybinis patentų biuras, Amgen Europe BV, noted on The SPC Blog here. A note on this decision, "ECJ preliminary ruling on patent law referral from Supreme Court", has now been published on International Law Office. This note, written by Edita Ivanauskienė (Lideika Petrauskas Valiunas ir partneriai LAWIN), concludes with the observation that the Court of Justice took a strict position regarding the issuing of supplementary protection certificates in a new Member State, demonstrating "the potential consequences of EU accession for the medicinal product's patent protection".

How far from Vilnius to Luxembourg?

Just when you think things in the wonderful world of SPCs can't get any more exciting than they already are, they do. Yesterday we reported on the reference in Synthon v Merz Pharma. On the same day the Curia website posted the information that there is to be yet another reference of a preliminary question for a ruling by the Court of Justice of the European Communities. This time the reference comes from Lithuania, from the Lietuvos Aukščiausiasis Teismas in Case C-66/09 Kirin Amgen, Inc. v Lietuvos Respublikos valstybinis patentų biuras. The questions referred are as follows:

"1. Is the date, referred to in Article 19(2) of Regulation No 1768/92, upon which that regulation enters into force to be understood for Lithuania as the date of its accession to the European Union?

2. Should the answer to the first question be in the affirmative, what is the relationship between Article 19 and Article 7 of Regulation No 1768/92 when calculating the six-month period and which of those articles is it necessary to apply in a case?

3. Did an authorisation to place a product on the market in the European Community enter into force unconditionally in the Republic of Lithuania from the date of its accession to the European Union?

4. Should the answer to the third question be in the affirmative, can the entry into force of the authorisation to place the product on the market be equated to its grant for the purposes of Article 3(b) of Regulation No 1768/92?"

Tour of Patent Offices: this time it's Lithuania

The SPC Blog's tour of European patent offices takes us next to Lithuania. The website of the State Patent Bureau of the Republic of Lithuania is accessible in the local language and in English. The site is more transparent than many, having a site-counter that tells readers how many visitors the site has received in total, how many have visited that day and how many are online at that precise moment. I was a little surprised to learn that, mid-day on Sunday, I was already the 6,283rd visitor to the site that day -- but perhaps Sunday is a popular day for IP activity in the Baltic region.

The formal structure of the site divides subject-matter between inventions, topographies, trade marks and designs. There is no page or click-through that is devoted to supplementary patent certificates at all. However, a site search for "SPC" throws up one hit -- a 300 page pdf document dated 27 February 2006 which turns out to be the Official Gazette. A word search of that document produces two hits for "SPC" and none at all for "supplementary patent certificate". Site searches for "supplementary protection certificate" fare substantially, producing four hits of which three are in English: two are from the 2oo2 Annual Report, the third being a read-only Word document containing the English translation of the Lithuanian Patent Act as amended to June 2005.