Patent lawyers in the UK have spent the last three months pondering, debating and at times indulging in an element of despair (to put it mildly) about what might be the impact of the judgment of the Supreme Court in Actavis v Eli Lilly [2017] UKSC 48 on issues of validity (see here). Today they…
Whilst ostensibly a standards essential patents dispute, there have now been two decisions from the English Courts in this case both on the construction of a licence agreement under Californian law. These two judgments have come before any substantive decisions on infringement or validity of the three patents asserted by Philips against Asus and HTC….
In paragraph 54 of its judgment of 12 July 2017, the UK Supreme Court wrote that “[…] notwithstanding what Lord Diplock said in Catnic [1982] RPC 183, 242, a problem of infringement is best approached by addressing two issues, each of which is to be considered through the eyes of the notional addressee of the…
UPDATE with quotes of the press conference of Michel Barnier at the bottom of this blogpost Will London’s pharmaceuticals and life sciences section of the Unified Patent Court have to be relocated post-Brexit? The EU will investigate this as part of the Brexit negotiations. This has been reported by ScienceBusiness.net. According to the website, the…
By Gregory Bacon Yes, you read that right. Thirteen years after the House of Lords had firmly shut the door on any notion of a doctrine extending the scope of patent protection outside the claims, the UK Supreme Court in yesterday’s judgment in Actavis v Eli Lilly [2017] UKSC 48 reversed gear and reintroduced a…
When this author published his blog of 27 June 2017, a reader kindly sent in a comment pointing out that as this author had not inserted the word “Spanish” before “Supreme Court”, and the blog was written in English, the reader had been misled; he initially thought that the judgment discussed had been issued by…
Preparations for the launch of the Unitary Patent system are progressing, despite the uncertainties and delays in the ratification process in Germany and the UK. The Case Management System (CMS) of the Unified Patent Court (UPC) will be ready ‘as of August 2017 and until the opening of the Court’, and tailored to prepare for the…
The Court of Appeal (Floyd LJ, Kitchin LJ and Longmore LJ) held that there was no issue of principle which prevented the courts from exercising their discretion to grant declarations of the type postulated in Arrow Generics Ltd (i.e. declarations that a product was old or obvious in patent law terms at a particular date)…
By Gregory Bacon The UK Supreme Court announced this morning that it has allowed Eli Lilly’s appeal and held that Actavis’ pemetrexed products directly infringe Lilly’s European patent to pemetrexed disodium in the United Kingdom, France, Italy and Spain. The Court has also dismissed Actavis’ cross-appeal and held that Actavis’ products would also indirectly infringe…
If the period of provisional application of the Unified Patent Court Agreement starts before the summer break, it is still possible that the Unitary Patent system launches this year. European Commissioner Elzbieta Bienkowska said this in a press conference after the meeting of the EU Competitiveness Council, 29 and 30 May 2017 in Brussels. Bienkowska…
