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…
The Federal Patent Court (FPC) ruled on the interplay between limitation proceedings before the EPO and a national nullity action, and the circumstances in which a request for a declaratory judgment concerning (partial) termination of proceedings in relation to the limited part of the patent is admissible and well-founded. The FPC held that where the…
The Federal Court of Justice confirmed that the definition of the person skilled in the art aims at defining a fictive person, from whose point of view the prior art and the patent is considered. Therefore, this definition cannot be based on considerations as to interpretation of the patent or inventive step. Case date: 09 January…
The FCJ held that when assessing inventive step the claim should be interpreted so that the disclosed embodiments are taken into account. Prior art that is far removed from the disclosed embodiments can thus not be assumed to disclose the most important features. Further, it was again confirmed that prior art that already provides a…
In an interference proceeding, the Patent Trial and Appeal Board correctly determined that claims 65-67 of applicant General Hospital Corporation’s (GHC’s) U.S. Patent Application No. 13/789,575 for methods of removing hair by using nanoparticles to damage hair follicles lacked sufficient written description under § 112 of the Patent Act, the U.S. Court of Appeals for…
In preliminary injunction proceedings, the influential Barcelona Court of Appeal held that reasons of “congruence” bind the court to basing the assessment of inventive step strictly on the particular prior art document chosen as the closest prior art by the party challenging its validity, regardless of whether that choice is technically and objectively justified. This…
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…
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 district court in Chicago did not err in dismissing a patent infringement suit filed by Maxon, LLC against several smart television manufacturers on the ground that the asserted patents—describing an electronic means of increasing user control over subscription entertainment content for smart TVs—were invalid as directed to an abstract idea that lacked an…
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…
