When defining the technical problem underlying an invention, it may not simply be assumed that the person skilled in the art needed to address a particular problem. On the contrary, the technical problem must be formulated so generally and neutrally that the question as to which incentives a person skilled in the art obtained from…
(a) Advantages of the invention that have only become evident once the invention was made, and at which therefore the skilled person would not have directed his efforts to further develop the state of the art, may not be used to define the technical problem underlying the invention (the Aufgabe of the invention). (b) Depending…
In T 2130/11 the Board held that a disclaimer removing more than strictly necessary to restore novelty would not be in contradiction with the spirit of G 1/03 if it was required to satisfy Article 84 EPC and it did not lead to an arbitrary reshaping of the claims.
With its judgment of March 5, 2015 (I-2 U 16/14), the Higher Regional Court (HRC) Dusseldorf reversed the first-instance decision and has now come to same conclusion as did the High Court of Justice for England and Wales (here) by holding that pemetrexed dipotassium does not fall within the equivalent scope of protection of EP1…
On 24 March, 2015, the Enlarged Board of Appeal of the EPO, the final judicial arbiter of the interpretation of the European Patent Convention, issued Decision G 3/14 addressing the question of when, and to what extent, clarity objections could be raised by a party challenging the validity of a patent through the EPO’s Opposition…
The judgement “Schleifprodukt” rendered by the German Federal Court of Justice on 25 November 2014 could be seen as a step towards harmonisation with the EPO because the court carried out the test for the admissibility of claim amendments by assessing whether the feature combination of the amended claim in its entirety represents a technical teaching which is identifiable from the original application as being suitable for achieving the effects of the invention.
A first review of the EPO’s proposals for the EP-UE renewal fees in comparison to the current rates by Thorsten Bausch and Greg Sach The EPO, or more specifically the president of the EPO, has recently submitted proposals for the level of renewal fees for the future European Patent with Unitary Effect (EP-UE) to the…
by Anja Petersen-Padberg The Federal Court of Justice decided in the “Electric Kettle” case (25.06.2014, docket X ZR 72/13) that the placing of goods in transit proceedings does not infringe a patent right in Germany as the country of transit. The court stressed that it is of no relevance whether the goods were placed in…
by Stephan Disser The German Federal Court of Justice (FCJ) has just issued its written decision in the case “Repaglinid” (X ZR 128/09). As far as can be seen, the decision is not yet available on the FCJ’s website www.bundesgerichtshof.de. The FCJ rejected the patent proprietor’s appeal against the decision of the Federal Patent Court…
by Niels Hölder and Thomas Koch In “Zugriffsrechte” (Access Rights) (docket X ZR 35/11), the Federal Court of Justice decided that a claim can in principle not be construed such that it covers none of the embodiments described in the specification. To simplify the facts, the claim in question specified two process steps. The Federal…
