The Federal Court of Justice held that introducing only selected features of an example into a claim is allowable if the resulting combination in the claimed generality is derivable from the application as originally filed. Further, a general incentive from the prior art does not render the specific embodiment of an invention obvious. Case date:…

It seems to be a more and more realistic scenario that the UK may leave the European Union on March 29, 2019 without an agreement. A lot has been written about the effect of such a “hard Brexit” on trade in general and –more interesting to us working in the patent field- on the future…

The German Federal Supreme Court has decided on what is necessary to establish a legal interest in a declaratory judgment of non-infringement under German law. The Supreme Court’s decision, which we will discuss in this post, is available in German (X ZR 62/16 – “Slug Bait”). The case concerned the declaration of non-infringement (“DNI”) of…

The Federal Court of Justice confirmed that German Courts should take into consideration decisions rendered by the EPO deciding bodies and Courts of other EPO member states. If the decisions differ, the German Courts should deal with the earlier reasons in detail. Case date:04 April 2017 Case number: X ZR 61/15 Court: Federal Court of Justice…

The fundamental question which types of products are amenable to SPC protection and which types of marketing authorizations allow the filing of SPCs has aroused much controversy in Europe, and reached a climax when the CJEU in its judgment Boston Scientific (C-527/17) of 25 October 2018 denied the grant of SPCs on the basis of…

The Federal Constitutional Court of Germany (BVerfG) intends to decide on the complaint against German ratification of the Unified Patent Court Agreement this year. The case (2 BvR 739/17) is on the 2019 decision list, which was published yesterday. It doesn’t come as a surprise. The UPCA case was on the 2018 list as well,…

If a patent only provides the skilled person with a general scientific explanation as to why the procedure disclosed therein is suitable for the purpose in question and does not disclose a new technical teaching in relation to this purpose, but merely a discovery of biological correlations, then this is insufficient to acknowledge novelty (continuation…