The Federal Court of Justice further clarifies the scope of disclosure of a prior art document and the criteria for determining inventive step after the landmark decision ‘Olanzapin’. More specifically, the Court ruled that: a) a prior art disclosure of an enantiomeric compound does not clearly and unambiguously disclose the actual enantiomers unless the disclosure…
The Federal Court of Justice confirmed the legal reasoning of the Federal Patent Court that a company that continued the business of another company, while it was founded independently from the continued company and does not take over the trade name under which it conducted business, is not bound by a non-contest clause between the…
The Federal Court of Justice (Bundesgerichtshof) ruled that a defendant in a patent infringement suit may successfully raise an antitrust defense against the issue of an injunction where the asserted patent is standard-essential and the defendant has tried to obtain a license to the patent under reasonable conditions. The full summary of this case has been published…
The Federal Court of Justice ruled that the subject matter of a patent does not extend beyond the content of the application as filed when terms are used in the claims that are not literally used in the application text but are summarizing words for longer descriptions in the application as filed. A full summary…
A patent infringement action may not be rejected on the grounds that a feature of the asserted patent claim seems to be unclear in its technical meaning. A lack of clarity may only give reason to limit the feature to the narrowest reasonable meaning. The full summary of this case has been published on Kluwer IP Law.
The Federal Court of Justice held that a licensee’s failure to exploit an exclusive patent license can justify termination of the license agreement by the licensor, even if there is no breach of contract or default by the licensee. From an objective licensor’s perspective, however, there must be no prospect of an improvement in the…
