The Patent Trial and Appeal Board’s construction of a key claim term in a patent directed to a method for fabricating a self-aligned contact hole in a semiconductor circuit was overbroad in light of the actual claim language and specification, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit has held. Because a prior art…
In paragraph 54 of its judgment of 12 July 2017, the UK Supreme Court wrote that “[…] notwithstanding what Lord Diplock said in Catnic [1982] RPC 183, 242, a problem of infringement is best approached by addressing two issues, each of which is to be considered through the eyes of the notional addressee of the…
In this case the FCJ considered the question of whether one of the co-owners of an invention is individually entitled to file a patent application for that invention. The Court held that in general an application is not permissible if it is made only in the name and on behalf of that co-owner. In such…
The recent Apple v. Baili case has generated a wide interest in design patents. This article discusses developments on judicial standards for determining design patent infringement applied in Apple v. Baili, and some implications from this case. Such standards involve how to determine distinctive features, what to be considered to differentiate a functional feature, what…
When this author published his blog of 27 June 2017, a reader kindly sent in a comment pointing out that as this author had not inserted the word “Spanish” before “Supreme Court”, and the blog was written in English, the reader had been misled; he initially thought that the judgment discussed had been issued by…
On 30 June 2017, the Danish Maritime and Commercial High Court issued a preliminary injunction against MBH-International A/S’ and its Danish distributor’s, OneMed A/S, import, offer for sale and sale of the urinary catheter assembly “Qufora OneStep”. Coloplast had applied for a preliminary injunction against the “Qufora OneStep” catheter assembly with reference to its European…
The Court of Appeal (Floyd LJ, Kitchin LJ and Longmore LJ) held that there was no issue of principle which prevented the courts from exercising their discretion to grant declarations of the type postulated in Arrow Generics Ltd (i.e. declarations that a product was old or obvious in patent law terms at a particular date)…
By Gregory Bacon The UK Supreme Court announced this morning that it has allowed Eli Lilly’s appeal and held that Actavis’ pemetrexed products directly infringe Lilly’s European patent to pemetrexed disodium in the United Kingdom, France, Italy and Spain. The Court has also dismissed Actavis’ cross-appeal and held that Actavis’ products would also indirectly infringe…
Public prior use when a third party discloses all features of the patent-in-suit before the priority date to the alleged infringer, without concluding a non-disclosure agreement with the alleged infringer. A full summary of this case has been published on Kluwer IP Law
The Court of Intellectual Property has exclusive jurisdiction to revoke patents. The mandatory arbitration court established by Law 62/2011 cannot declare the nullity of a pharmaceutical patent even if the issue is raised merely as a defence and with effects limited to the parties to the proceedings. A full summary of this case has been…
