The FCJ held that the Defendant in a nullity action is only required to prepare an auxiliary request following the preliminary opinion of the Federal Patent Court which takes those aspects into consideration which were mentioned by the Patent Court. In general, there is no reason for the Defendant to prepare additional auxiliary requests with…
A panel of the Enlarged Board of Appeal (EBA) of the EPO rejected a request to replace the EBA chairman for suspected partiality. The reasons for allowing such a request in decision R19/12 had since been removed because the chairman had discontinued all his managerial activities in the senior management committees of the EPO. Under…
Goods placed in transit proceedings do not infringe a patent in the transit country. It is not relevant whether the goods were placed in so-called “T1” external transit proceedings or in “T2” transit proceedings where goods are declared to be released for free circulation on the market of the European Union and are forwarded without…
The District Court The Hague finds that it is competent based on Article 7 Dutch Code of Civil Procedure (Article 6(1) Brussels I / Article 8(1) Brussels Ibis – plurality of defendants) even though the article’s preconditions are no longer met. A full summary of this case has been published on Kluwer IP Law.
The Board of Appeal rejected an attempt to apply the fiction of novelty of “medical” substances and compositions of article 54(5) EPC to a dialysis membrane. Contrary to T2003/08 the claimed dialysis membrane did not contain any further substance that might constitute an active ingredient. With reference to arguments in T2003/08, the board noted that…
The Bulgarian Patent Office refused to issue a supplementary protection certificate for a medical product comprising three components as one of them was not within the scope of protection of the basic patent. The decision of the Patent Office was first annulled by the first instance court but subsequently upheld by the Bulgarian Supreme Administrative Court….
The Board emphasized that there was a relation between who was to be considered to be the skilled person for judging inventive step on one hand and the choice of the closest prior art on the other hand. A general problem to modify a product from one field so that it could be used in…
Inventions regarding a method of improving the yield of triploid seedless watermelons by pollination with a specific type of diploid water melon are not to be regarded as an essentially biological process for the production of plants and are therefore not excluded from patentability under Article 53(b) EPC. These biotechnological inventions according to Rule 26(2),…
Direct access to seized documents, selected from a larger pool of previously seized evidence, is denied on the basis of Dutch procedural provisions relating to Directive 2004/48/EC, because the defendant has not been allowed prior review of the seized selection. The court only allows access to a limited selection obtained by sufficient specific key word…
The CoA Karlsruhe held that the fact that a referral is pending before the CJEU regarding the issues of the criteria for raising the FRAND defense (C-170/13 Huawei) does not justify the suspension of the enforcement of an infringement judgment issued against a defendant. The court also expressed their expectation that – even after a…
