The Federal Court of Justice confirmed that the value of the matter in dispute can be amended on appeal, including retroactively for the first instance, if new facts are divulged that command such an amendment. The determination of the value of the matter in dispute is important for a German court case, since it directly…
The Federal Court of Justice held that the purpose of determining the technical problem (objective) in invalidity proceedings is to locate the starting point of skilled efforts to enrich the state of the art without knowledge of the invention, in order to assess, in the subsequent and separate examination of patentability, whether or not the…
A recent study by two eminent scholars from the Max Planck Institute for Innovation and Competition (MPI) on „The Impact of Brexit on Unitary Patent Protection and its Court“, which is available here, casts significant doubts whether it will be possible for the United Kingdom to stay in the UPC Agreement after the UK has…
The choice of the starting point for evaluation of inventive step requires a justification which is not in itself provided by the fact that a certain citation proves ex post to be the “closest state of the art”. In particular, it cannot be assumed without further ado that an expert in a technical field in…
The Federal Court of Justice held that in utility model registration proceedings, the utility model department must examine whether one of the grounds for refusal listed in Sec. 2 Utility Model Law exists. Further, the exclusion of utility model protection for methods is in accordance with Article 14.1 and Article 3.1 of the Basic Law….
…great forces are up against each other and a dispute arises. Fortunately, it is not a war of biblical dimensions, but only a lawsuit, a significant and legally interesting one though, about an Supplementary Protection Certificate. The parties were Teva (Hebrew word for nature) and Gilead (aka Hill of Testimony, a mountainous region east of…
Have a great weekend, everyone 🙂
Background The story about Patrick Corcoran has been covered several times on this blog, e.g. here, here and here and other blogs, e.g. here and here. There is even a Wikipedia site about it. In a nutshell, the story is about a (previous) EPO Board of Appeal member who was suspended and banned from access…
The FCJ held that: a) An objection by one party can lead to the petitioner being required to demonstrate a legitimate interest in the inspection of the files of a patent nullity procedure, but only if the opposing party demonstrates an interest of its own which may stand in the way of the inspection. b)…
The FCJ ordered that the petitioner must be granted access to the entire file wrapper. The objections raised by the plaintiff with regard to parts of the file which allow conclusions to be drawn on infringement proceedings conducted in parallel or which contain information on the designs challenged there were unfounded. Case date: 11 July 2017…
