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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…
On 2 March 2011 the Barcelona Court of Appeal handed down a judgment reversing a decision from Commercial Court n.4 of Barcelona, which rejected the patent owners’ ‘lis pendens‘ defence against a revocation action filed by L.A. and others based on lack of inventive step. In its judgment of 2 March 2011, the Court of…
The Court held that in order to decide that a patented invention is novel, it is not sufficient that the wording in the patent description is different from the wording in the prior art. The technical subject-matter of the prior art must be different. Moreover, it had to be assessed whether publicly accessible information could…
The Court addresses the issue of how to deal with a feature of a patent claim that was not originally disclosed, but the deletion of which would lead to a broadening of the scope of the claim and would thus not be admissible. The Court allowed that the feature remains in the claim, provided that…
The patentee (Claimant) filed a request for an interim injunction against the Defendant, ordering it to stop using the patented method, stop selling or importing Valsacor film coated tablets or any other products that would infringe the European patent, to seize the mentioned tablets, and to order Defendant to pay a penalty. The court rejected…
It has been reported by the Italian Generics Association that on 14 March 2011 the European Commission started infringement proceedings against Italy for an alleged breach of Community law related to Art. 68 (1bis) of the Italian IP Code according to which “companies intending to manufacture pharmaceutical specialties outside patent protection may commence the procedure…
In the recent case of Schütz v Werit, the Court of Appeal examined the boundary between repair and making under the English implementation of Article 25 of the Community Patent Convention. The claimants’ patent in question was for intermediate bulk containers (IBCs), in particular IBCs comprising two parts: a cage and a large plastic container…
On 2 March 2011, the Court of Appeal of Barcelona (Section 15) handed down a judgment that has helped to clarify the scope of Article 125.2 of the Spanish Patent Act, which had been interpreted in different ways by some Courts of First Instance since its modification in 2001. Article 125.2 establishes that “the judge…
The German Patent Act (sec. 145) provides for a special limitation of further actions on account of the same or similar act based on different patents. Such actions shall only be admissible if the plaintiff was not in a position to assert a patent in an earlier suit without his own fault. The landmark decision…
On 10 March, the Court of Justice of the European Union (“CJEU”) issued its long-awaited opinion on the patentability of human embryonic stem cells in Brüstle v Greenpeace C-34/10. Biotechnological inventions are subject to Directive 98/44/EC of the European Parliament and of the Council on the legal protection of biotechnological inventions (the “Directive”). Article 6(1)…
