In an appeal from an opposition decision that maintained the patent, an EPO board refused to admit an auxiliary request that had been filed by the proprietor during opposition and formally re-entered with the initial response to the grounds of appeal. Other than implicitly through arguments about the main request, the response failed to take…
…well not really, but the German Federal Court of Justice has recently issued a decision (Kreuzgestänge, X ZR 103/13) that may expose Germany’s “Bifurcation System” to even more questions and criticism than in the past. Bifurcation is a term probably originating from geography and generally means “splitting of a main body into two parts”. An…
This month of October will fade away, leaving behind it the “Protocol to the Agreement on a Unified Patent Court on Provisional Application”, done at Brussels on 1 October 2015, the purpose of which – as its name suggests – is to provisionally apply Articles 1-2, 4-5, 6(1), 7, 10-19, 35(1, 3 and 4), 36-41…
By Jan Lindberg and Kiira Lehtonen About a year ago we had an exceptional case in Finland where Ranbaxy Laboratories Limited, Ranbaxy UK Limited and Ranbaxy Pharma AB (“Ranbaxy”) were awarded millions in damages in a case against Warner-Lambert Company LLC and Pfizer Oy (“Pfizer”), given in June last year (Helsinki District Court, case L…
On 19 October 2015 the Preparatory Committee of the UPC has adopted the final 18th draft of the Rules of Procedure (RoP) of the Unified Patent Court. This means that the Committee ends its work regarding the Rules of Procedure. There is only one subject that still needs to be included in the RoP and…
The Finnish Supreme Court held that the reversal of the burden of proof stipulated in Article 34 TRIPs as implemented in the Finnish Patent Act does not per se require a party to disclose its manufacturing process, but only to prove that it used a different process than that specified in the patent. The threshold…
Astornet Technologies—the licensee of a method patent for securing “vehicular gate entries” at airports—could not sue three government contractors that allegedly induced or contributed to the direct infringement of the asserted patent by the Transportation Security Administration (TSA), the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit has ruled (Astornet Technologies Inc. v. BAE Systems,…
The Rules of Procedure for the future Unified Patent Court have been published. According to the UPC Preparatory Committee ‘this is a major milestone in the progress of the Committees work’. ‘The agreed text is Draft no. 18 which shows that the text has undergone a rigorous process of development and testing. The Rules of…
Since February 2015, hedge fund manager Kyle Bass has filed more than 30 petitions seeking Inter Partes review of U.S. patents covering approved pharmaceutical products. Kyle Bass even formed a special entity for this purpose–the Coalition for Affordable Drugs–with a stated goal of targeting patents that “have little value other than to drive up prescription…
Now that Italy has changed its mind and joined, Spain has become the only EU member state to stay out of the Unitary Patent (UP) system. How good or bad is this for the country and its companies? And will anything change because of the CJEU’s rejection of the Spanish complaints against the UP on…
