In last month’s blog about the recovery of legal costs in Belgian IP enforcement proceedings, it was announced that the Mons Court of Appeal would probably be the first Belgian court to hand down a substantive ruling on the consequences of United Video Properties / Telenet (CJEU of 28 July 2016, C-57/15). A week later,…
On April 26 2017, the Eastern High Court of Denmark gave an interesting decision in a case between Orifarm Generics A/S and Novartis A/S, who is the holder of a patent and a number of utility models regarding a transdermal patch. On August 12 2014, the Maritime and Commercial Court had found that Orifarm by…
Since Warner-Lambert successfully defended its pregabalin patent and obtained injunctions against generic market entry in Apotex Pty Ltd v Warner-Lambert Company LLC (No 2) [2016] FCA 1238 (see our coverage of the case in ‘Carving out the principles: a comparative review of the Australia and UK Lyrica cases’), the Australian Lyrica dispute has continued through…
On 24 November 2016, the Court of Appeal of Barcelona (Section 15) handed down a judgment in which it confirmed that “the interpretation of the scope of protection of a patent for the purposes of analysing its validity cannot be different from when its infringement is analysed”. The Judges also highlighted the relevance of the…
The Patent Trial and Appeal Board erroneously construed the term “aseptic” in an inter partes review (IPR) of a patent for a method of aseptically bottling sterilized food, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit has held. The Board erred in construing the term as incorporating “any applicable United States FDA standard” rather…
Most readers will be aware of the so-called “all elements” test, whereby patent infringement is normally discarded unless the allegedly infringing device or process reproduces each and every element of the claim. The “all elements” test contrasts with the so-called “essentiality” test. According to this test, there can still be infringement if an element of…
On April 3, 2017, the latest decision was handed down in the patent revocation battle between medical device manufacturer Nouvag and Jean Malak, a plastic surgeon specialized in liposuction. This conflict has taken on epic proportions, in part because of the ruling rendered by the Belgian Supreme Court on February 3, 2012 confirming that the…
To the extent that the Patent Trial and Appeal Board did not provide an explanation for its obviousness rejection of 13 claims of a Securus patent on a system and method for reviewing monitored conversations and identifying items of interest, the ruling was vacated and remanded by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal…
An EPO board of appeal expressed its opinion that EBA case law implied that no further use should be made of the three-part “essentiality test” of T 331/87, for deciding whether removal of a feature from a claim complies with article 123(2) EPC. The only test endorsed by the EBA was the “gold standard”. The…
In this case, the Federal Court of Justice considered the value of a secondary indicium for a decision on inventive step. The FCJ confirmed that if an invention differs from the decades-old general practice in the relevant technical field, then this may be an auxiliary criterion supporting inventive step. A full summary of this case…
