The Supreme Court held that the US doctrine of file wrapper estoppel is not applicable under the EPC. According to the Court only Article 69 of the EPC and the Protocol on its interpretation should be applied when determining the scope of a claim. The modifications of the patent application during prosecution cannot be taken…
In a judgment issued on September 28, 2010, the Court of First Instance of Paris held that a dosage regime is effectively a method of treatment and is, as such, excluded from patentability in view of Article 53c of EPC 2000. In this particular case, the use of finasteride for the treatment of androgenic alopecia…
This judgement is one of many issued in the worldwide litigation pending between Novartis and Johnson & Johnson concerning Novartis’ patent for ophthalmically compatible extended wear contact lenses. The decision contains a recapitulation of all possible grounds for invalidity of a patent. The Court rejected the detailed claims of invalidity for lack of sufficiency, dealt…
The new French law implementing the London Protocol is immediately applicable, even to European patents granted before the entry into force of this new law. The Court held that the new law was procedural and should, as such, be enforced immediately with retroactive effect. A full summary of this case has been published on Kluwer…
In this case, the Court of Appeal of Paris affirmed a judgement of the Court of First Instance of Paris holding that a product “may not acquire novelty simply because it is prepared in a purer form”. The Court decided that “the parameters that are not inherent to the chemical compound itself, but rather are…
In this case the Court of Appeal of Lyon affirmed the first French judgement granting an interlocutory injunction to prevent imminent infringement of a patent. The President of the First Instance Court had not considered any argument relating to the validity of the patent, and decided that in summary proceedings, only the existence of the…
