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After surprising the patent community with a new set of rules which make life difficult for the applicants, the attorneys and, to go by EPO members’ internet blogs, also the EPO staff, some examination divisions are now introducing the ‘common knowledge’ approach to reject patents. The examiners cite the ‘common knowledge’ as closest prior art….
A 1 July 2009 decision of the Tribunal de Grande Instance of Paris illustrates how the French courts proceed when they are seised of a nullity claim of the French designation of a European patent against which opposition may be filed or opposition proceedings are pending.
In a case involving the US multinational Mars and an Italian producer of rice (Riseria Monferrato), the Court of Appeal of Turin, by decision of 19 November 2008, tackled – one of the few cases in Italian case law – the interesting issue of the difference between discoveries and inventions and their patentability. The case…
Council Regulation 469/2009 (the “SPC Regulation”) governs the grant of supplementary protection certificates in the EU. Core to its interpretation are Articles 1, 3, 4 and 5. Most pertinently, Article 3 provides that an SPC shall be granted if, among other things and in the relevant member state, (a) the product is protected by a…
In a global patent battle between Ajinomoto and Global Biochem Technology (GBT), a Belgian front was opened on March 25, 2008 when Ajinomoto seized more than 4 million kilos of infringing L-Lysine (a compound feed additive) produced by GBT. After unsuccessful third party opposition proceedings by GBT and its European distributors, patent litigation on the…
The German Federal Supreme Court (Bundesgerichtshof) has recently made clear that every court has to take into account preceding decisions of the European Patent Office (EPO) and of courts of other contracting states to the European Patent Convention (EPC) if these decisions essentially concern the same questions. Although there is no principle of precedence in…
The German Federal Court of Justice decided that a method concerning the dynamic document generation of structured documents in a client-server-environment, which is implemented by software, was not excluded from patent protection as a program for data processing systems. A method is always of technical nature if it concerns the direct interaction of elements of…
According to Article 61.2 of the Spanish Patent Act “where a patent concerns a process for the manufacture of new products or substances, unless there is proof to the contrary, it shall be presumed that any product or substance with the same characteristics has been obtained by using the patented process“. Over the last few…
This matter concerns levocetirizine, which is an enantiomer of cetirizine. The Court held that, at the priority date, it would have been obvious to the skilled person to check whether levocetirizine (which had been individually disclosed before the priority date) had improved pharmacological characteristics compared to the racemic mixture (i.e. cetirizine). As a rule, resolving…
On 22 April 2010 the German Federal Court of Justice issued its Decision in a case on appeal from the German Patent Court. The later rejected on the ground of excluded subject matter a claim to a method for dynamic generation of documents. In essence the method carries into effect an interface that translates commands…
