Of the mainstream UK political parties, only the Liberal Democratic Party is overtly “Remain”. It has just launched its EU Parliamentary Election campaign with the somewhat surprising slogan “Bollocks to Brexit”. From an IP lawyer’s perspective, this raises an amusing question of whether copyright could subsist in such a slogan, because if so, the LibDems…
A further interesting decision handed down by the Judges of the English Patents Court prior to the Easter break was a judgment from Nugee J concerning proceedings between E. Mishan and Hozelock relating to a UK patent and European patent, both entitled “Expandable Hose Assembly”. E. Mishan (trading as Emson) claimed that Hozelock’s expandable garden…
The run up to the Easter vacation is always a busy time in the English Patents Court as litigants seek have applications determined to set the direction of travel for the next period of the case and Judges, understandably, try and clear their desks before the break. 2019 was no exception to this rule and…
by Elizabeth McAuliffe At a Form of Order hearing on 18 March 2019, Henry Carr J gave a high level ex tempore decision in TQ Delta LLC v ZyXEL Communications Limited et al to grant an injunction, with immediate effect. The approved judgment was published on 28 March 2019 ([2019] EWHC 745 (Pat)). This decision…
The UK Supreme Court today handed down its decision in Actavis v ICOS. The decision was unanimous, with Lord Hodge giving the only judgment. The case concerns two principal questions. First, how the test for obviousness applies to a dosage patent; and secondly, whether the Court of Appeal was entitled to reverse the judgment of…
In a post yesterday our colleagues at Vossius commented on the CJEU’s decision, which had just been handed down in Abraxis*. As Vossius have explained, although the decision appears to give clarity for new formulations of old products, it remains unclear as to how this can be reconciled with Neurim, which was not overturned. In…
It seems to be a more and more realistic scenario that the UK may leave the European Union on March 29, 2019 without an agreement. A lot has been written about the effect of such a “hard Brexit” on trade in general and –more interesting to us working in the patent field- on the future…
On 4 March 2019, we uploaded a post noting that the English Patents Court had decided to refer a question to the CJEU on whether it was permissible for a patentee to rely on a third party’s MA to obtain an SPC in the absence of consent from that third party. We briefly summarised the…
On Friday 1 March 2019, Arnold J handed down his judgment in the patent dispute between Eli Lilly and Genentech regarding IL-17A/F antibodies*1. This lengthy judgment, which as the Judge observed: “was one of most complex patent cases I have ever tried”, is littered with interesting legal points. However, to many life sciences patent lawyers,…
The Federal Constitutional Court of Germany (BVerfG) intends to decide on the complaint against German ratification of the Unified Patent Court Agreement this year. The case (2 BvR 739/17) is on the 2019 decision list, which was published yesterday. It doesn’t come as a surprise. The UPCA case was on the 2018 list as well,…
