At the end of January, we reported the Warner-Lambert v Actavis decision of 21 January 2015, in which Arnold J refused to grant Warner-Lambert interim relief in relation to an apprehension of patent infringement by Actavis of Warner-Lambert’s patent comprising Swiss-form claims directed to the use of pregabalin in the preparation of a medicament for…
In August 2013, I produced a short commentary for the Kluwer Patent Blog regarding the decision of Mr Recorder Meade QC in SDL Hair Ltd v Next Row Ltd & Ors [2013] EWPCC 31, where Mr Meade was faced with the question of whether two letters and one email constituted groundless threats of patent infringement…
Most readers will know that so-called Swiss form claims (“Use of drug X in the manufacture of a medicament for the treatment of disease Y”) were first proposed by the Enlarged Board of Appeal of the EPO in the EISAI case back in December 1984 to allow new uses for known drugs to be patented….
A decision from Mr Justice Birss in Adaptive Spectrum And Signal Alignment Inc v British Telecommunications Plc [2014] EWHC 4194 has introduced additional complications for parties found to infringe a patent who then seek to work around the same. In essence that party cannot simply sit back and assume that the only feature to address…
Regular readers of the Kluwer patent blog may recall that in April 2014, the English Patents Court revoked two patents relating to trastuzumab, the active ingredient in Herceptin, which is marketed outside of the US by Roche. One patent was for a dosage regimen and the other related to a composition of trastuzumab containing certain…
by Dr Mark A G Jones The UK’s Intellectual Property Act 2014, enacted to implement recommendations of the 2011 Hargreaves Review of Intellectual Property, has extended the powers available to the United Kingdom Intellectual Property Office (UKIPO) to revoke British patents of its own motion. This applies both to patents granted directly by the UKIPO…
Appeal (Ref [2014] EWCA Civ 1335) has upheld Birss J’s decision last year in HTC v Gemalto (Ref [2013] EWHC 1876 (Pat)) but has found that he erred on a point of construction. The appeal concerned just one of the patents considered at first instance (EP (UK) 0932865) which relates to using higher level programming…
The English Patents Court (Birss J) recently demonstrated a somewhat unconventional approach to answering the statutory question of obviousness when assessing inventive step*. The judgment also provides some guidance on the role of commercial as opposed to technical considerations, in particular regulatory concerns, when assessing obviousness. Leo Pharma, the defendant in these proceedings, market a…
We reported recently that the IPCom Guidelines which set out when the English Court should stay patent actions pending EPO oppositions appear to be “More honour’d in the breach than the observance”. This had been in response to the decision of Arnold J of 10 July 2014 who had refused to grant such a stay…
It is perhaps a poor reflection on the CJEU that it regularly issues rulings that, when the case is restored before the referring court, lead both parties to an action to claim victory. However this happened yet again when Warren J was given the unenviable task of implementing one of the trio of references decided…
