Inspired by several Finnish companies, like many other interest groups, having expressed their concern regarding the level of renewal fees of the Unitary Patent, I thought of writing about a slightly different protection regime that provides not only fast but also low-cost protection for technical inventions, namely, utility models. First I have a question for…
This time we take a look at various decisions that share one thing in common — piercing the corporate veil doctrine. Even if these rulings are not purely patent law cases, they will definitely have influence on forthcoming litigations. First, let us look at the recent Finnish Supreme Court case 2015:17, in which the defendant…
By Jan Lindberg and Kiira Lehtonen The recent judgement of the Finnish Market Court (MAO:18/15) given on January 16th provides further guidelines as to what is expect from a method to be patentable especially in relation to existing techniques, while also serving as a good reminder that arguments non-related to the actual subject-matter do not…
Last week, we reported on the challenging endeavour to set up Patent Translate, the machine translation system which is under joint development by the European Patent Organisation (EPO) and Google and which is a crucial element of the Unitary Patent (UP) package. Intellectual Property Office (IPO) officials from Hungary, Finland and the Czech Republic told…
For Europeans who don’t speak English, German or French, the three official Unitary Patent (UP) languages, the future UP system will bring about an even more radical change than for those that do. Over the years, millions of patents from companies all over the world will have been held valid in their territory, although these…
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…
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…
The interesting six-jurisdiction patent case between two of the world’s leading enzyme manufacturers, the Danish companies Danisco A/S (now part of DuPont) and Novozymes A/S has already been subject to earlier blogs both here and several times on EPLAW and PatLit. To recap the story briefly, Novozymes started the proceedings by applying for a preliminary…
Imagine: Wouldn’t it be fantastic to have one single patent which you could apply for at the WPO, the World Patent Office? A World Patent, which would be valid worldwide and which could be enforced in each single country of the world with worldwide effect? Decisions of the national local chambers of the World Patent…
