The newly established 15th Patent Senate of the Appeals Court of Düsseldorf (Presiding Judge Dr. Ulrike Voß) has referred a number of questions concerning the calculation of damages in IP cases to the European Court of Justice. This opens the floor for the ECJ to talk about damages, as far as I know for the…

by Anne Katrin Schön On 12 June of this year, the German Federal Court of Justice (FCJ) in Karlsruhe concluded nullity appeal proceedings (X ZR 96/11) against the German part of European patent EP 1 071 556 B1 by dismissing the nullity action and upholding the patent as granted. Overruling the first-instance judgment 1 Ni…

The Preparatory Committee of the Unified Patent Court (UPC) is very satisfied with the opinion of the Advocate General (AG) of the European Court of Justice (CJEU) on the Spanish challenge. As chairman Paul van Beukering commented to Kluwer IP Law, ‘It couldn’t be much  better than this.’ According to Van Beukering, the recent opinion…

Software interoperability seems to be at the heart of any discussion to how to protect computer programs lately. Recent cases such as Oracle v. Google before the US Supreme Court, and SAS v. WPLtd before the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) have probably something to do with it. The truth is that…

As readers will no doubt be aware, earlier this year the Preparatory Committee of the Unified Patent Court (“UPC”) drew up a short-list of candidate Judges after selecting them from an overwhelming raft of more than 1300 applications. This author knows of at least one Spanish candidate Judge whose expression of interest was discarded on…

Dr. Simon Klopschinski In recent time the trademark, copyright and competition law senate (1st senate) of the Federal Court of Justice (FCJ) and one of the patent senates of the Düsseldorf Higher Regional Court have issued conflicting decisions on the question of whether the presentation of a product at a trade fair in Germany constitutes…