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…
A board of appeal of the European patent office held that a decision to reject an opposition with grounds based on an improperly corrected version of the patent as granted maintains the text used in the decision to grant, without the corrections. A decision of the examining division to correct the text after grant by…
Given the furore surrounding Birss J’s decision on the non-technical issues in Unwired Planet v Huawei earlier this month, which included the first determination of FRAND terms by an English Court (reported on by my colleague Rachael here), it would have been easy to miss the first appellate Court judgment on the related technical issues…
The federal district court in Tyler, Texas, correctly denied Core Wireless Licensing S.A.R.L.’s (“Core Wireless’s”) motion for judgment as a matter of law that Apple infringed a claim of a Core Wireless patent directed to a means for sending packet data from a mobile station such as a cellular telephone to a cellular system or…
by Nicholas Round At the start of this month, the UK Supreme Court took a break from its recent post-Brexit work interpreting (and developing) constitutional principles to hear an intellectual property matter. This rare Supreme court foray for a patent produced a ripple of excitement across the UK IP litigation community not least because (uniquely…
In an inter partes review (IPR) proceeding challenging a SimpleAir patent that described a method of transmitting data to remote computing devices, the Patent Trial and Appeal Board did not err in concluding that IPR petitioner Google failed to establish that a combination of prior art references rendered the challenged claims unpatentably obvious, the U.S….
The enlarged board of appeal (EBA) of the European patent office effectively ended the possibility of poisonous priority. The EBA held that entitlement to partial priority may not be refused for a claim encompassing alternative subject-matter by virtue of generic expressions (generic “OR” claims) if the priority document discloses part of that subject matter in…
