The FCJ confirmed that a new means of challenge based on the technical content of a document filed for the first time in the course of appeal proceedings is only to be admitted under the provisions of Section 531 paragraph 2 numbers 1 to 3 of the German Code of Civil Procedure, irrespective of whether…
The FCJ confirmed that inventive step is to be acknowledged if the feature(s) distinguishing the claimed invention from the starting point for the assessment of inventive step are not directly and unambiguously derivable or at least rendered obvious by the prior art. This applies equally to functional features. Case number: X ZR 51/06 Case date: 29…
Why would anyone want to have their own supplementary protection certificate (SPC) revoked? – The answer is, quite simply, Article 3(c). Under Article 3(c) of Regulation (EC) 469/2009 on SPCs for medicinal products (and, likewise, under Article 3(1)(c) of Regulation (EC) 1610/96 on SPCs for plant protection products), an SPC shall be granted only if…
Over the past few years the pan-European and parallel national patent litigation based on Eli Lilly’s pemetrexed patent has attracted considerable attention, as it has resulted in a number of diverse land mark decisions in relation to the doctrine of equivalence, as evidenced by the various posts on the Kluwer Patent Blog. By way of…
This decision by the FCJ confirms that when both parties declare the lawsuit resolved, only the allocation of costs has to be decided upon by the court. This must be done according to the court’s equitable discretion, giving consideration to the parties’ previous arguments. On the facts, the FCJ came to the conclusion that it…
Practitioners dealing with supplementary protection certificates (SPCs) have been holding their breath at the unfolding of the “Truvada saga” around Gilead’s SPCs for the HIV medicament Truvada, which contains the active ingredients tenofovir disoproxil and emtricitabine. The lawsuits involving the Truvada SPCs in various European countries have already given rise to such noteworthy decisions as…
The fact that the German Federal Constitutional Court (BVerfG) requested the Bundespräsident not to proceed with ratification of the Unified Patent Court Agreement indicates that the complaint against the UPCA will be admitted for a decision. This is one of the observations of Dr. Ingve Björn Stjerna, the Düsseldorf based IP specialist who is behind…
The Federal Court of Justice confirmed that the value of the matter in dispute can be amended on appeal, including retroactively for the first instance, if new facts are divulged that command such an amendment. The determination of the value of the matter in dispute is important for a German court case, since it directly…
This decision by the FCJ confirms that the cited prior art should, generally, provide concrete suggestions, hints or at least provide other reasons beyond the recognizability of the technical problem to seek the solution of a technical problem in the way presented in the patent. Case date: 23 May 2017 Case number: X ZR 90/15 Court: Federal Court…
The Federal Court of Justice held that the purpose of determining the technical problem (objective) in invalidity proceedings is to locate the starting point of skilled efforts to enrich the state of the art without knowledge of the invention, in order to assess, in the subsequent and separate examination of patentability, whether or not the…
