The Court, in infringement proceedings brought by Novartis against Actavis for marketing generic Valsartan, held that the assessment of infringement had to be made as of the time of infringement, not as of the priority date. This is the first decision in years in Norway taking a position on this issue. The judgement also deals…
The Court of Appeal overturned a decision of the High Court and held that the act of replacing Shutz’s bottles in Shutz’s outer protective cages with Werit’s bottles constituted ’ making’ products protected by Shutz’s patent, which encompassed both the bottle and the cage. Click here for the full text of this case. A full summary…
In this case the claimant filed an application for a supplementary protection certificate (SPC), however the application was refused by the Lithuanian patent office. Appeals before national courts were unsuccessful. The Supreme Court referred the question whether the six-month period for application for an SPC begins on the date of granting Community marketing authorization, or…
The so-called “person skilled in the art” is a fictitious character in charge of, among other functions, assessing whether or not an invention is obvious with respect to the state of the art. For the experts appointed by the parties to be able to illustrate to the Court what would have been the understanding of…
The Court of Appeal allowed Virgin’s appeal and overturned the decision of the High Court which had granted Delta’s application for summary judgment on the basis that it was wrong to say Virgin had no real prospect of establishing infringement of its patent. Click here for the full text of this case. A full summary of…
The Supreme Court held that the US doctrine of file wrapper estoppel is not applicable under the EPC. According to the Court only Article 69 of the EPC and the Protocol on its interpretation should be applied when determining the scope of a claim. The modifications of the patent application during prosecution cannot be taken…
On 2 March 2011 the Barcelona Court of Appeal handed down a judgment reversing a decision from Commercial Court n.4 of Barcelona, which rejected the patent owners’ ‘lis pendens‘ defence against a revocation action filed by L.A. and others based on lack of inventive step. In its judgment of 2 March 2011, the Court of…
The Court held that in order to decide that a patented invention is novel, it is not sufficient that the wording in the patent description is different from the wording in the prior art. The technical subject-matter of the prior art must be different. Moreover, it had to be assessed whether publicly accessible information could…
The Court addresses the issue of how to deal with a feature of a patent claim that was not originally disclosed, but the deletion of which would lead to a broadening of the scope of the claim and would thus not be admissible. The Court allowed that the feature remains in the claim, provided that…
The patentee (Claimant) filed a request for an interim injunction against the Defendant, ordering it to stop using the patented method, stop selling or importing Valsacor film coated tablets or any other products that would infringe the European patent, to seize the mentioned tablets, and to order Defendant to pay a penalty. The court rejected…
