| Abstract [eng] |
Art. 53 (a) of the European Patent Convention indicates that patents shall not be granted to inventions the commercial exploitation of which would be contrary to “ordre public” or morality. In addition, according to the latter provision, such exploitation shall not be deemed to be so contrary merely because it is prohibited by law or regulation in some or all of the member states of the European Patent Organisation. Although currently there are not many decisions in the European Patent Office’s case law on the interpretation and application of the Art. 53 (a) EPC, the existing ones show that there is no consensus on the tests and standards suitable for assessing the commercial exploitation of inventions on the basis of this provision. This way, the content of the Art. 53 (a) EPC and the interpretation as well as application of this provision to inventions, in particular, to those from the biotechnological field, are unclear and difficult to predict. Therefore, the objective of this research is to reveal, the relationship between the European patent law, as a part of the Western legal tradition, and the biomedical sciences, as a tradition, when decisions, based on the Art. 53 (a) EPC, regarding the granting of European patents to biotechnological inventions are being made, and to evaluate the impact of such relationship to the granting of legal protection to the afore-specified inventions in the European patent system. |
