Chemical Engineering

Chemical engineering concerns designing processes to produce, transform and transport materials, beginning with experimentation in the laboratory followed by implementation of the technology in full-scale production. It is used in the field of biotechnology, pharmaceuticals, electronic device fabrication and environmental engineering, among others.

Amendments, Chemical Engineering, Extension of subject matter, Extent of Protection, France, Scope of protection

(Véron & Associés)/

Syngenta Limited (hereinafter referred to as “Syngenta”), a company governed by the laws of England and Wales, is the holder of European patent No. 0 382 375 entitled “Fungicides”. On 28 September 2009, it submitted to the Institut national de la propriété industrielle (INPI; French Industrial Property Office) a request for limitation of a claim of the French designation of…

Case Law, Chemical Engineering, Germany, Novelty

(Hoffmann Eitle)/

A composition obtainable on the market is at least not then novel if the composition can be analyzed and reproduced by a skilled person without undue burden. For this purpose, it is sufficient for a complex com¬po-sition that is not easily identifiable, if the skilled person can establish a manageable number of hypotheses on the…

Amendments, Chemical Engineering, EPC, Extent of Protection

(Hoffmann Eitle)/ /1 Comment

Article 123(3) EPC stipulates that a European patent may not be amended in such a way as to extend the protection it confers. A special case of extension of the protective scope may occur in claims which define both the type of and the amount of a specific component. An issue addressed in a series…

(Indirect) infringement, Chemical Engineering, France, Procedure

(Véron & Associés)/

The French saisie-contrefaçon is known to be an extremely powerful and effective tool to collect evidence of infringement of a patent (as of any other intellectual property right, see “Saisie-contrefaçon” on Wikipedia and also P. Véron et alii, Saisie-contrefaçon, Paris, Dalloz Action, 3rd ed. 2013-2014). It is a procedure that allows to request and obtain from…

Case Law, Chemical Engineering, Germany, Novelty, Priority right, Revocation, Validity

(Hoffmann Eitle)/

The Supreme Court held that claiming priority of an earlier application requires a direct and unambiguous disclosure in the priority document of all features of the technical teaching as defined in the claims. If the claimed invention is characterized by a particular property of one of its components that has not (clearly) been disclosed in…

(Indirect) infringement, Chemical Engineering, France, Injunction, SPC

(Véron & Associés)/

On 15 January 2013, the French Cour de cassation, in the litigation between the Novartis companies and the Actavis companies about valsartan, drew the consequences of the 9 February 2012 order rendered by the CJEU in the frame of a parallel litigation in the United Kingdom. As already explained in a previous post, the company governed by the laws…

(Indirect) infringement, Case Law, Chemical Engineering, Finland, Injunction

(Roschier)/

The Helsinki Court of Appeal granted Lundbeck preliminary relief against Sandoz. The Court held in the light of Article 34 TRIPS that in preliminary relief cases the standard of proof of infringement may not be too high if the patent in suit is a process patent for the manufacture of a new product, and therefore…

(Indirect) infringement, Case Law, Chemical Engineering, Finland

(Roschier)/

The Helsinki Court of Appeal found that ratiopharm had infringed Merck’s supplementary protection certificate covering losartan. The Court applied the reversed burden of proof of the Patents Act, which has its basis on Article 34 of the TRIPS Agreement. It further considered that, in the absence of proof to the contrary, the active ingredient losartan…

Case Law, Chemical Engineering, Germany, Validity

(Krieger Mes Graf & v. der Groeben)/

The Federal Court of Justice held that the meaning of a patent claim as a whole and the contribution of the single features to the result of the invention must be assessed in nullity proceedings. It is not permitted to attribute a certain meaning to the claim to only avoid an issue of undue broadening….

Case Law, Chemical Engineering, Germany, Inventive step

(Hoffmann Eitle)/

In the assessment of inventive step, the question whether the prior art discloses a pointer for the skilled person to use the measures described therein, and to apply these to a known substance, could be relevant. It should be investigated whether the measures from the prior art gave rise to the expectation that the solution…