Mushrooms are not “plants”, therefore do not fall under the rule against the patentability of plants set forth by European Patent law: The Hague Local Division of the Unified Patent Court recently upheld the validity of a European Patent covering the “Heirloom” mushroom in its decision to grant a request for preliminary injunction filed by a patent holder, a mushroom spawn developer, against a mushroom farmer.

Interestingly, the UPC local division also held that, in the case at issue, the patent holder’s delay in taking action against the infringing product was not to be considered unreasonable, since technical analyses requiring several months were necessary to gather evidence of the infringement and rebut the technical defences raised by the defendant.

Read the guest article for the The IPKat by our partner Valentina Predazzi with SIB Lex partner Federico Caruso, and kindly hosted by Kat Jocelyn Bosse.