In this case the FCJ discussed the criterion of “equivalence” for a non-literal infringement of a patent. The Court held that one has to assess all technical effects which have to be achieved with the patented features to solve the underlying technical problem. The entire combination of these effects forms the patented solution. For the…
The enlarged board of appeal of the European patent office allowed a petition for review of a board decision because the right to be heard had been denied. The decisive ground for the decision under review involved a new conclusion from a document that was in the proceedings. This conclusion could not be directly derived…
An EPO board held that an appellant in a cross-appeal can be bound by an analogy of the bar against reformatio in peius, when filing a request later than with the grounds of appeal. When the appellant could have filed the request with the grounds of appeal, but filed the request only in response to…
The CJEU decided on a referral by the District Court Düsseldorf with regard to the interpretation of Art. 102 TFEU in the context of patent infringement actions regarding standard essential patents (SEPs). The Court held that the owner of an SEP who seeks injunctive relief against an alleged infringer does not abuse a dominant position…
If foreign counterparts of a European patent have been declared invalid in five European jurisdictions and the arguments in these court decisions are substantially convincing, the prima facie invalidity of the Swiss part of the same European patent is sufficiently established for the purposes of preliminary injunction proceedings. A full summary of this case has…
The Oslo District Court invalidated the Norwegian patent NO 324 454 B3 on a method intended for the direct detection of oil and gas in subsea reservoirs using electromagnetic measurements due to lack of novelty over four citations. This judgment differed from the English Court of Appeal, which had found that there were no grounds…
The Patents Court has allowed an application for pre-action disclosure of a subset of patent licences to a potential defendant to a claim for infringement, so as to allow that potential defendant to quantify any claim against it prior to the commencement of proceedings. A full summary of this case has been published on Kluwer…
The board refused to apply Rule 56 EPC (filing missing drawings) to allow replacement of a poor quality drawing in a patent application by a drawing from the priority document. Although J2/12 had allowed replacement under Rule 56 in the case that it could be established that wrong drawings were filed, this applied only to…
The District Court holds that Shionogi’s SPC for rosuvastatin (Crestor®) is invalid in part for added matter and grants a declaration of non-infringement for Resolution Chemicals’ proposed zinc salt of rosuvastatin. A full summary of this case has been published on Kluwer IP Law.
Dealing with claim construction issues, the FCJ held that a claim construction which leads to the result that none of the embodiments described in the patent specification would be covered by the claim can only be considered if other possibilities of claim construction have to be definitely excluded or when the claim contains a clear…
