The CJEU decided yesterday that a negative declaratory action seeking to establish the absence of liability in tort, delict, or quasi-delict does fall within the scope of the “place of tort” pursuant to Article 5 (3) of Council Regulation (EC) No 44/2001 (“Brussels Regulation” or BR), case 133/07. This question has long been in dispute,…
On 27 September 2012, a new consolidated version of the Draft Agreement on a Unified Patent Court (Document 14268/12) was (finally) published. The consolidated text includes some of the amendments agreed upon on 5 December 2011 as well as on the 29/30 June 2012 EU Council summit, and also presents further amendments and quite a…
On 3 July 2012, the European Parliament adopted the Commission’s proposal for a new Regulation on “Customs Enforcement of Intellectual Property” (COM(2011)0285) at first reading. The document P7_TA(2012)0272, which proposes many amendments, is the provisional position of the EP subject to further negotiations. Between October and November 2012, representatives of the Commission, the Council and…
The Regional Court in Dusseldorf and the Polish Higher Regional Court in Gdansk have ruled in June and July 2012 that the Bolar exemption and the experimental-use exemption only apply to the testing entity and that a third party’s manufacturing and selling to the testing entity is not exempted.
The interesting six-jurisdiction patent case between two of the world’s leading enzyme manufacturers, the Danish companies Danisco A/S (now part of DuPont) and Novozymes A/S has already been subject to earlier blogs both here and several times on EPLAW and PatLit. To recap the story briefly, Novozymes started the proceedings by applying for a preliminary…
Jurisdiction of Article 6 (1) BR against Co-Defendants [each infringing all national parts of EP] affirmed;
Jurisdiction according to Art. 31 BR affirmed for cross-border provisional injunctions despite nullity pleas
In the decision T 1621/09 of the Boards of Appeal of the EPO, it was decided that late filed arguments of the appellant amended the case to such an extent that their admittance lay within the Board’s discretion, even though the new arguments were based on facts and evidence already in the proceedings. Having found so the Board, exercising its discretion, did not admit the new arguments into the proceedings.
The Higher Regional Court Dusseldorf decided on 26 April 2012 (docket I-2 U 18/12) that the admissibility (under Article 27 BR) of exclusive licensee’s patent infringement action despite pending NDA proceedings against patentee in another Member State depends on whether the declaratory judgment will have the force of res judicata against licensee. This must be…
This contribution compares various decisions of national European courts on inventive step in the case of a monohydrate of a (known) drug, i.e. calcipotriol.
Fairly recent case law of the EPO suggests that the concept of individualized disclosure may reach further than many people think. This can have severe implications for the validity of patents and patent applications, especially in the field of chemistry and life sciences. In the following these decisions and their potential consequences are analyzed and…
