The UK IPO (the British bureau for intellectual property) recently made clear to various stakeholders that the proceedings for British approval of the agreement on a Unified Patent Court, better known as the “UPC Agreement”) continue. The UK IPO mentioned however that the UPC Agreement will probably be voted upon only after the British EU…
Hopefully the United Kingdon won’t jeopardize the Unitary Patent project with a vote to withdraw the European Union, says Jane Lambert, barrister from 4-5 Gray’s Inn Square in London. ‘However, it could still continue without us’, Lambert told Kluwer IP Law in an interview. Lambert, who recently published a series of articles (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6) on the…
The U.K. Patents Court has held Warner-Lambert’s second medical use patent regarding the use of pregabalin for the treatment of pain invalid on the ground of insufficiency. Even if the patent were valid, the Court held that Actavis would not have infringed Warner-Lambert’s patent as a result of any “cross-label” use of their product sold…
Case reported and summarised by Gregory Bacon, Bristows LLP The UK does not operate a system of automatically staying proceedings which concern validity of a European patent where there are ongoing opposition proceedings at the EPO. Nevertheless, the Court retains discretion to stay such proceedings, and a recent judgment of Mrs Justice Rose on 18…
Case reported and summarised by Gregory Bacon, Bristows LLP Mr Justice Carr has issued an interesting interim judgment regarding the jurisdiction of the English Court to grant negative declarations in relation to patent applications before the EPO (Fujifilm Kyowa Biologics v Abbvie Biotechnology [2016] EWHC 425 (Pat)). The case concerns an application by Fujifilm Kyowa…
The most sensible option for the UK is to postpone the ratification of the UPC Agreement until the ‘Brexit’ referendum of 23 June 2016 has been held, according to Luke McDonagh, Lecturer in IP Law at City University London. Mc Donagh told Kluwer IP Law there is nervousness in the ‘very pro-EU IP Community in…
The Court of Appeal denied Actavis’ claim for declarations of non-infringement in respect of several national designations of Eli Lilly’s European Patent. Whilst agreeing with the High Court that the national designations in suit were not directly infringed, it, nevertheless, overturned the prior decision on the basis of there being indirect (contributory) infringement. The Court…
Case reported and summarized by Gregory Bacon, Bristows LLP Mr Justice Carr is only a few months into his judicial career, but having already provided welcome guidance on the role of plausibility in considering both the questions of inventive step and sufficiency (see earlier blog post on Actavis v Eli Lilly), he has now produced…
A recent decision at the UK Intellectual Property Office emphasises again how important it is to establish ownership of rights in inventions (particularly before the first patent application is filed) and to have documentary evidence to support this. The case concerns a dispute between the University of Warwick and one of its employees over the…
Meredith Wilson famously wrote in 1951 that it was beginning to look a lot like Christmas. Well, the various versions of this song by Crosby, Mathis, Bublé, Minogue et al may be on a near constant loop on the radio but in all honesty, with the daffodils out and the trees in full bud, it’s…
