Last week, the Patent Trial and Appeal Board of the U.S. Patent Office (PTAB) issued eight decisions in Inter Partes review and Covered Business Method proceedings, in each case invalidating at least some of the challenged claims of the patent at issue. That brings to 15 the total number of patents invalidated in an Inter Partes review…
Article 123 (2) EPC and corresponding national provisions prohibit an applicant or patentee from amending a patent application or patent such that its subject-matter extends beyond the content of the application as originally filed. The statute is the same throughout Europe, but the practice is not always so. An issue where the Case Law of…
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…
The readers will recall that on 18 July 2013, the European Court of Justice (“ECJ”) handed down its controversial judgment in case C‑414/11 Daiichi Sankyo Co. Ltd, Sanofi-Aventis Deutschland GmbH v. DEMO Anonimos Viomikhaniki kai Emporiki Etairia Farmakon. In this judgment the ECJ, making a 180º twist in relation to the criteria endorsed in Opinion…
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….
Owing to the amendments to the German Patent Act (GPA) passed with the so-called Patent-Act Amendment Act of October 19, 2013 (Federal Gazette 2013, 3830), a number of user-friendly changes have been implemented. The most important ones, including electronic file inspection, early first patent examination during search proceedings and improvements in patent opposition proceedings, as…
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…
