The FCJ held that when assessing inventive step the claim should be interpreted so that the disclosed embodiments are taken into account. Prior art that is far removed from the disclosed embodiments can thus not be assumed to disclose the most important features. Further, it was again confirmed that prior art that already provides a…
The Federal Court of Justice confirmed that a nullity defendant can defend its patent to a limited extent only insofar as it is attacked by the nullity plaintiff. The limited defence of the patent in dispute by combining an attacked claim with an uncontested subclaim or with one of several variants of an uncontested subclaim…
…clearly less spectacular than the UK’s ratification of the UPCA, but nevertheless noteworthy and – perhaps! – even more relevant in the long run (but that we shall see). My colleague Mike Gruber was kind enough to compile the following brief summary of the Federal Patent Court’s full decision on the Raltegravir (Isentress®) compulsory license…
Yesterday, 25 April 2018, AG Wathelet has handed down his opinion in the Teva v Gilead reference (Case C-121/17) suggesting that the question should be answered as follows: “The fact that a substance or combination of substances falls within the scope of protection of the basic patent is a necessary, but not sufficient, requirement for…
In an extraordinary appeal pursuant to Sec. 321a of the German Civil Procedure Code, the FCJ confirmed that the courts are obliged to take note of and consider the actual and legal submissions of the parties to the proceedings. The constitutionally guaranteed right to be heard (Art. 103 para. 1 Basic Law) is intended to…
The Federal Court of Justice held that the fact that all of the embodiment examples in an application comprise a specific feature stands in the way of claiming protection for embodiments without this feature, if it can be derived from the content of the application that the means provided in the claim serve to solve…
While the patent world is waiting with anxiety what the German Federal Constitutional Court will do with the challenge of the legal basis of the Unified Patent Court Agreement, the man behind this complaint, Düsseldorf patent attorney Dr. Ingve Björn Stjerna has attacked the economic foundation of the UP system in a recent article on…
In its judgment of 7 November 2017, X ZR 63/15 – Digitales Buch, the German FCJ (Bundesgerichtshof) took the opportunity to complete its Kommunikationskanal case law on the admissibility of a generalisation of a teaching in patent claims by the omission of specific features that have been taught in the examples of the patent application….
This case concerns the issue of the urgency required in order to justify a preliminary injunction for patent infringement. The CoA Düsseldorf had to deal with the question of whether the Petitioner may wait for the outcome of a pending invalidation action before filing a motion for a preliminary injunction. The CoA Düsseldorf confirmed that…
The German constitutional complaint against ratification of the Unified Patent Court Agreement is on the list of cases to be decided by the Bundesverfassungsgericht, the Federal Constitutional Court of Germany this year. A preview of the cases was published today here (in German). The rapporteur for the case (Az. 2 BvR 739/17) is Professor Dr….
