The FCJ decided in the recently published decision “Wundverband” [Wound Dressing] “Moelnlycke Health Care v. BSN Medical” (docket X ZR 70/12) on 19 February 2013 that if patentee has granted an exclusive license after he has filed an infringement action, an exclusive licensee will be (in part) a legal successor of the patentee. As a…
The Federal Court of Justice in Germany held in its recent judgment of January 22, 2013 (court docket: X ZR 70/11) that to claim co-inventorship the contribution of the co-inventor need only be found in parts of the description of the patent and does not have to be found in the claims. The Court stated…
The German Federal Court of Justice (Bundesgerichtshof, BGH) addressed some interesting questions on patents protecting methods relating to data in the decision “MPEG-2-Videosignalcodierung” (“MPEG-2 video signal encoding”), judgement of 21 August 2012, X ZR 33/10. This all was round up by explanations on patent exhaustion in the context of test purchases. In simple terms, the…
In its “Leflunomid” decision of 24 July 2012 (Case X ZR 126/09), the FCJ declared a patent claim to be invalid which covered a combination of leflunomide and teriflunomide, on the grounds that it had long been known in the prior art (for 100 years) that some leflunomide spontaneously and unavoidably converts teriflunomide over time…
by Hetti Hilge The District Court Duesseldorf stayed a case between Huawei and ZTE concerning mobile and base stations within the LTE standard and referred five question to the CJEU (docket No. 4b O 104/12). The court wants to clarify under what circumstances an infringement court has to consider a compulsory license defense in a…
The Regional Court Dusseldorf submitted on 21 March 2013 a referral to the CJEU with five questions regarding the interpretation of Art. 102 TFEU relating to the antitrust objection of compulsory license in patent infringement actions. The patent infringement action at issue is concerned with a LTE-standard-essential patent. The plaintiff declared its readiness via the…
A composition obtainable on the market is at least not then novel if the composition can be analyzed and reproduced by a skilled person without undue burden. For this purpose, it is sufficient for a complex com¬po-sition that is not easily identifiable, if the skilled person can establish a manageable number of hypotheses on the…
by Henrik Timmann There is a saying in Germany: Two lawyers add up to three different opinions. Well, for a long time the Federal Patent Court seemed to have been inspired by this saying when deciding on the reimbursement of lawyers’ fees in nullity actions. Background Most of you will know about the bifurcated system…
The Supreme Court held that claiming priority of an earlier application requires a direct and unambiguous disclosure in the priority document of all features of the technical teaching as defined in the claims. If the claimed invention is characterized by a particular property of one of its components that has not (clearly) been disclosed in…
The Federal Court of Justice held that the meaning of a patent claim as a whole and the contribution of the single features to the result of the invention must be assessed in nullity proceedings. It is not permitted to attribute a certain meaning to the claim to only avoid an issue of undue broadening….
