On 8 December 2011, the presiding judge of the Tribunal de Grande Instance of Paris has rendered an order in the context of the worldwide battle between Samsung and Apple. Samsung alleged that Apple’s iPhones 4S contain chips infringing its European patents No. 1 188 269 and 1 097 516, declared essential to the UMTS standard within the framework of ETSI (European…

by Stephan von Petersdorff-Campen – rospatt osten pross Where a patent has been exclusively licensed to a third party, it is this licensee who is directly prejudiced by an infringement of said patent. But a 2008 verdict by the German Federal Supreme Court (BGH) also allows the patent holder as licensor to bring his own…

We revisit this case, not this time regarding the question of what constitutes the ‘making’ of an invention as resolved by the Court of Appeal in March 2011, but with regards to the question of costs in relation to Schütz as an exclusive licensee. The general position under English law is if an exclusive licence…

On 8 October 2010, the Cour d’Appel of Paris rendered a interesting decision about the interpretation of the wording of one of the settlement agreements which have been concluded between Institut Pasteur and the American health authority (DHHS/NIH) in order to put an end to the various disputes which opposed them concerning the paternity of the HIV-1/VIH retrovirus’ discovery and the patents relating thereto. The question at stake was to determine if a gp 110 protein was the subject-matter of the said settlement agreement so that Abbott, as a sublicensee of the NIH, could validly exploit in France that gp 110 protein in its detecting kits. Otherwise Abbott would have been an infringer of the Institut Pasteur’s European patents.

The question at issue was whether a verbal preparatory agreement between the parties on a patented invention had given rise to a valid license agreement and ensuing entitlement to damages. The Supreme Court affirmed an earlier Court of Appeals decision, for the most part, by finding that a (patent) license agreement must be in written…

The District Court of The Hague, Administrative Division, considers the granting of an SPC to a patent proprietor that does not possess a market authorization for a medicine protected by the patent, not to be in conformity with the purpose of the SPC Regulation on medicinal products (Regulation (EC) No. 469/2009). A full summary of…

The Barcelona Court of Appeal confirmed a preliminary injunction ordered by Commercial Court number 4 of Barcelona on 9 June 2008 preventing the launch of several generics of Atorvastatin. One of the main arguments raised by the defendants in their appeal was that the company that had filed the application for a preliminary injunction did…

The Federal Court of Justice (Bundesgerichtshof) ruled that a defendant in a patent infringement suit may successfully raise an antitrust defense against the issue of an injunction where the asserted patent is standard-essential and the defendant has tried to obtain a license to the patent under reasonable conditions. The full summary of this case has been published…

The Federal Court of Justice held that a licensee’s failure to exploit an exclusive patent license can justify termination of the license agreement by the licensor, even if there is no breach of contract or default by the licensee. From an objective licensor’s perspective, however, there must be no prospect of an improvement in the…