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…
…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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
I know that this is a patent blog. But something – I don’t know what, maybe it’s the upcoming meeting of the EPO’s Administrative Council – drives me to refer very briefly to a new CJEU ruling. Here is what the Court of Justice had to say about judicial independence in Case C-64/16. Emphases in…
Among other things, the EPO’s official vision also includes to set world-wide standards in efficiency, so let us look into this goal a bit more closely. To begin with, what is efficiency? Wikipedia defines it as follows: Efficiency is the extent to which time or effort is well used for the intended task or purpose….
Abstract This will be a very long post (sorry, dear readers!), yet it cannot and will not be comprehensive enough to cover all aspects of this topic. In summary, my take on EPO quality is that not all is bad and a lot of people are still doing a good job. However, it is presently…
What can people, in particular citizens of Munich and Bavaria, do if they feel that elementary constitutional rights are infringed, not somewhere abroad and far away, but literally next door, at the Isar river banks or in the Pschorrhöfe building? Unfortunately, this is no rhetorical question. If such things happen in the jurisdiction of German…
