The Patent Trial and Appeal Board correctly determined that all 79 claims of a patent related to a computerized method for identifying and substituting information in an electronic document were invalid for obviousness, the Federal Circuit has held. Although the Board erred in its analysis by declining to apply a prosecution disclaimer limiting the patent’s…

This case concerns the issue of the urgency required in order to justify a preliminary injunction for patent infringement. The CoA Düsseldorf had to deal with the question of whether the Petitioner may wait for the outcome of a pending invalidation action before filing a motion for a preliminary injunction. The CoA Düsseldorf confirmed that…

A Spanish patents court rules for the first time on the sometimes blurry line dividing “discoveries” and “inventions”. The Court found that a method for prenatal diagnosis based on the discovery that sufficient fetal DNA can also be detected in maternal serum or plasma is a non-patentable discovery, because it lacks any “additional technical teaching”…

Substantial evidence supported the Patent Trial and Appeal Board’s finding that an inter partes review petitioner failed to show that a patent owned by Thales Visionix—claiming a method for tracking motion relative to a moving platform—was not obvious over a prior art patent combined with two additional references, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the…

In a recent judgment rendered by the Danish Maritime and Commercial Court between Coloplast A/S (Coloplast) and Hollister Incorporated (Hollister), the Court considered whether or not Coloplast was the co-inventor (and co-owner) of a patent application filed by Hollister. In 2011, Hollister filed its European patent application EP 11175010.5 regarding a catheter package and the…

In a lawsuit involving the alleged infringement of an Exmark patent that described a lawn mower with improved flow-control baffles, a federal district court erroneously based its summary judgment finding of no invalidity solely on the fact that the patent claim at issue had survived multiple reexaminations, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal…

The Supreme Court upheld the decision of the First Instance Court that the defendant had been using oval-shaped signs that fell within the scope of the patent since 2008, without the consent of the plaintiff.  No defence was invoked during the proceedings, hence the defendant had infringed the plaintiff’s specific patent right. Case date: 28 March…

In a long-awaited judgment, the Spanish Supreme Court has clarified the application of the TRIPS agreement to patent applications affected by the Spanish reservation to the EPC: Article 70.7 of TRIPS allowed owners of patent applications filed before 7 October 1992, but which were still pending when TRIPS came into force, to amend the patents…