Just to mark the occasion…
Have a great weekend, everyone 🙂
Landgericht München: Patrick Corcoran is Innocent and Acquitted of all Charges
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…
Patent case: Akteneinsicht XXIII, Germany
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)…
Patent case: Vollständige Akteneinsicht, Germany
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…
Patent case: Ankopplungssystem, Germany
The Federal Court of Justice confirmed that a nullity defendant can defend its patent to a limited extent only insofar as it is attacked by the nullity plaintiff. The limited defence of the patent in dispute by combining an attacked claim with an uncontested subclaim or with one of several variants of an uncontested subclaim…
And here is Germany’s contribution to World Intellectual Property Day 2018
…clearly less spectacular than the UK’s ratification of the UPCA, but nevertheless noteworthy and – perhaps! – even more relevant in the long run (but that we shall see). My colleague Mike Gruber was kind enough to compile the following brief summary of the Federal Patent Court’s full decision on the Raltegravir (Isentress®) compulsory license…
The Dilemma with Clinical Trials and the Patent Law
Suppose you are a (patent) attorney in a pharmaceutical company and want to advise your company how to best protect the results of a clinical trial designed to find out the best possible treatment regimen of a certain known and approved drug X. The researchers of your company have devised and been allowed to conduct…
Patent case: Anhörungsrüge, Germany
In an extraordinary appeal pursuant to Sec. 321a of the German Civil Procedure Code, the FCJ confirmed that the courts are obliged to take note of and consider the actual and legal submissions of the parties to the proceedings. The constitutionally guaranteed right to be heard (Art. 103 para. 1 Basic Law) is intended to…
Patent case: Digitales Buch, Germany
The Federal Court of Justice held that the fact that all of the embodiment examples in an application comprise a specific feature stands in the way of claiming protection for embodiments without this feature, if it can be derived from the content of the application that the means provided in the claim serve to solve…
The EPO’s Vision (V) – Trust
This is the last post of my series on the EPO’s vision and the current reality, this time dealing with the issue of EPO and “trust”, including trust-building measures such as transparency, fairness and respect. Let’s begin by recalling the yardstick by which the EPO wants to be measured, its “vision”: Our vision – what…