The new Swedish Patent Law will come into force on January 1, 2025

The new Swedish Patent Law will come into force on January 1, 2025

On January 1, 2025, the new Swedish Patent Law officially came into effect. The revised new Patent Law codifies the substantive practices of the European Patent Office (EPO) into law and is modeled on the structure and terminology of the European Patent Convention (EPC), so that applicants will feel familiar with the new Swedish Patent Law and can search and examine multiple inventions in one patent application.

The new law also completes the alignment of Swedish legislation with the Unified Patent Court Agreement (UPC), which slightly improves the position of patent holders. Now, for joint infringement proceedings, the previous requirement of "knowing or obvious from the circumstances" has been changed to "provided the inventor knew or should have known and intended to use it to carry out the invention", and corrective measures (such as recall, explicit removal from commercial channels or destruction) can now be taken against infringing products (previously meaning products produced without the consent of the patent owner).

In addition, according to the new Patent Regulations, which are adapted to the new law, the representative of the applicant or opponent no longer needs to submit a power of attorney. However, if the PRV is informed of a change in the representative but is not informed that the authorization of the previous representative has been terminated, it may still be necessary to submit a power of attorney.