by Henrik Timmann There is a saying in Germany: Two lawyers add up to three different opinions. Well, for a long time the Federal Patent Court seemed to have been inspired by this saying when deciding on the reimbursement of lawyers’ fees in nullity actions. Background Most of you will know about the bifurcated system…
The French saisie-contrefaçon is known to be an extremely powerful and effective tool to collect evidence of infringement of a patent (as of any other intellectual property right, see “Saisie-contrefaçon” on Wikipedia and also P. Véron et alii, Saisie-contrefaçon, Paris, Dalloz Action, 3rd ed. 2013-2014). It is a procedure that allows to request and obtain from…
The Supreme Court held that claiming priority of an earlier application requires a direct and unambiguous disclosure in the priority document of all features of the technical teaching as defined in the claims. If the claimed invention is characterized by a particular property of one of its components that has not (clearly) been disclosed in…
In an appeal against a decision by the Opposition Division to maintain the patent in amended form, the Board ordered the representative of the opponent to file an authorization. The representative did not do so in due time, but indicated that the opponent would take no further action. The Board held that the legal fiction…
As the readers are well aware, quite often patented products are not necessarily marketed (or only marketed) by the patent owner. It is usual for patent owners to market their products through their subsidiaries and/or through third party co-marketers, which join forces with the former to obtain the best possible distribution of the patented product….
As previously reported on this blog, the new Unified Patent Court (UPC) will bring the biggest change in the patent litigation landscape Europe has ever seen. It will soon be possible to obtain a single court decision effective across the whole of a market worth around €10 trillion. The UPC will have jurisdiction over not…
Ensuring the independence and integrity of its judges is crucial for every court system. After its first year of existence, the Swiss Federal Patent Court has slightly amended its Guidelines on Independence for the part-time judges of the Federal Patent Court. However, those guidelines have proven to be very useful in practice. It is interesting…
On 15 January 2013, the French Cour de cassation, in the litigation between the Novartis companies and the Actavis companies about valsartan, drew the consequences of the 9 February 2012 order rendered by the CJEU in the frame of a parallel litigation in the United Kingdom. As already explained in a previous post, the company governed by the laws…
The Helsinki Court of Appeal granted Lundbeck preliminary relief against Sandoz. The Court held in the light of Article 34 TRIPS that in preliminary relief cases the standard of proof of infringement may not be too high if the patent in suit is a process patent for the manufacture of a new product, and therefore…
The Helsinki Court of Appeal found that ratiopharm had infringed Merck’s supplementary protection certificate covering losartan. The Court applied the reversed burden of proof of the Patents Act, which has its basis on Article 34 of the TRIPS Agreement. It further considered that, in the absence of proof to the contrary, the active ingredient losartan…
