The later finding of the biological relationships underlying the activity of a drug does not constitute a new teaching for technical action if the indication, the dosage and the way of using the drug coincide with an the prior disclosed use of a drug for the treatment of a disease (confirmed by FCJ 9 June…
The FCJ held that the right to claim priority, which is in fact the right to file a follow-up application, can be transferred to a third party who was not the applicant of the earlier application. This transfer is governed by the law of the earlier application, in this case German law. Neither German law…
In preliminary injunction proceedings: to fulfil the requirement of urgency a patentee must actively and with determination enforce the patent. A patentee does not have to wait for the outcome of nullity proceedings if a generic company has launched an infringing product on the market, thereby causing irreparable harm to patentee. A full summary of…
As a rule, an applicant has a right to inspection of respondent’s premises in order to prepare a claim for damages due to illegal exploitation of secret know-how. The applicant must designate construction plans which are to be inspected, otherwise the request for inspection will not be sufficiently precise and clear under Sec. 253(2) CCP….
The Board of Appeal used its discretionary power to declare inadmissible an appeal based on the claims as granted after the proprietor had only defended amended claims before the opposition division. Even if this should not be construed as abandonment of the claims as granted, the request should not be admitted for reasons of procedural…
The Court of Appeal of Burgos dismissed the appeal against the Judgment of the Provincial Court of Burgos, which upheld a patent for a pharmaceutical composition and its use, despite the fact that clinical trials regarding the patented composition and the patented use were mentioned in the prior art. The full summary of this case…
(1) If a plaintiff can prove there was an “offering” of means for the patented purposes, it can be assumed that the means were also delivered for those purposes, and that therefore the plaintiff has a right to claim damages and the provision of information due to indirect infringement. (2) When a patent is assigned…
The French Supreme Court condemned a patentee’s undue use of an evidentiary measure (infringement seizure, “saisie-contrefaçon”) as a way to obtain information from a competitor, specifically information relating to the manufacturing processes of its direct competitor, beyond the scope of the lawsuit (“fishing expedition”). The full summary of this case has been posted on Kluwer…
The Board vacated reversed a decision that deletion of drawings amounted to an extension of protection. The opposition Opposition division Division had revoked the patent with the argument that the amendment generally had an impact on the extent of protection conferred by the European patent because the drawings would be used to resolve ambiguities in…
If the patentee has granted an exclusive license after filing an infringement action, an exclusive licensee is (in part) a legal successor of the patentee. Therefore, as long as the patentee’s claims are pending at another German court, the exclusive licensee has no right to sue with regard to the same subject matter due to…
