On 15 October 2020 Meade J. handed down his first ever written judgment in his new role as a Judge of the High Court in MSD v Wyeth. The neutral citation for the case is [2020] EWHC 2636 (Pat) and a link to the judgment is found here. The Judge had heard the case back…

The UKSC Unwired Planet & Conversant judgment[1] Background This combined appeal deals with the relationship between patent owners, whose patents are declared essential to certain technical standards, and manufacturers of mobile devices (implementers) that make use of those standards. In this case, the standard essential patents (SEPs) in issue had been declared essential to the…

Mr Justice Morgan handed down judgment on 22 July 2020 ([2020] EWHC 1968 (Pat)) in relation to two patent infringement actions brought by Lufthansa which were heard together.  The first infringement action was against two defendants, Astronics Advanced Electronic Systems and Safran Seats GB Ltd.  The second action was against Panasonic Avionics Corporation. It is…

Mishan (T/A Emson) v Hozelock & Ors [2020] EWCA Civ 871 Since Arnold LJ’s elevation to the Court of Appeal in 2019, he and Floyd LJ have heard about 11 cases together, spanning a mixture of areas of law, some patents cases and some not.  In the majority of these cases, Floyd LJ (or a…

The tendency of English people to be understated in their use of language (other than on Twitter…) is often joked about with continental friends and colleagues.  For example, when an English person expresses a slight disagreement, their continental counterpart might have felt more able to be blunt and say that something is just plain wrong. …

On 1 April 2020, the Court of Appeal, led by Floyd LJ, handed down judgment concerning the strike out of an Arrow declaration in litigation between Mexichem and Honeywell. Honeywell owns six patents that focus on the use of two refrigerants (‘ze’ and ‘yf’) in mobile air-conditioning systems (“MACs”), often used in cars, with a…

On 17 March 2020,The Hague Court of Appeal dismissed a preliminary injunction (PI) based on alleged infringement of a Standard Essential Patent (SEP) held by a Non-Practicing Entity (NPE) based on a balancing of interests – without assessment of validity and infringement of the patent in suit, and without assessment of FRAND-related obligations. In case…

By Hetti Hilge/Dr. Simon Klopschinski Today the German Federal Constitutional Court (FCC) has declared the German law ratifying the Agreement on a Unified Patent Court (UPC Agreement) to be unconstitutional and void (see here). On 31 March 2017 a private person filed with the FCC a constitutional complaint against the German act of parliament approving…

On Friday 13 March 2020, Birss J handed down a pair of judgments in the litigation between Evalve (a member of the Abbott group of companies) and Edwards Lifesciences, a veteran of UK patent litigation over the past decade. In the first judgment Evalve’s two UK patents, EP (UK) 1 408 850 and EP (UK)…

On 5 December 2019, the IP Tribunal of the Supreme People’s Court (SPC) handed down two decisions in which – in a first for China, the SPC heard and decided on both the patent validity and infringement disputes in one consolidated proceeding.  Background The two actions arose out of a patent infringement dispute between the…