As has been well publicised, the end of 2012 was a time of considerable progress in the long history of the Unitary patent and Unified Patent Court (“UPC”) dossier, culminating in adoption of the Unitary Patent Regulation 1257/2012 and its accompanying Language Regulation 1260/2012. But what next? Built into the Unitary Patent Regulation is a…
Hearings in the UK’s highest Court concerning patents are rare. In fact, since the Supreme Court was established in place of the House of Lords in October 2009, there has only been one substantive decision namely the Eli Lilly v Human Genome Sciences case. Last week the Supreme Court heard its second patents case, Schütz…
The applicability of the obvious to try question has been a thorny issue in UK patent law for some time, and the desire for a party seeking invalidity to apply this test has pervaded many recent pharmaceutical patent cases in the UK, particularly where the patent claims a single enantiomer and the prior art indicates…
Note on High Court, 27 November 2012, Actavis/Eli Lilly Introduction Last year the English Supreme Court in a copyright case held that there is no doubt that the modern trend is in favour of the enforcement of foreign IP rights and that there are no issues of policy which militate against it nor is there…
Liversidge v (1) Owen Mumford Limited (2) Abbott Laboratories Limited In April 2011, the claimant commenced patent infringement proceedings in the UK Patents County Court (“PCC”) against the defendants in respect of European Patent No. 2067496 entitled “Medical Injector”. The defendants denied infringement and counterclaimed invalidity. Background The claimant filed a patent application for a…
Miquel Montana’s preliminary comments on the decision of the English High Court in Actavis v Eli Lilly [27th November 2012] provide interesting food for thought. Since some readers may not be familiar with the facts of the case and the relevant procedural rules in the UK, I will attempt to provide an overview before providing…
On 27 November 2012, the Honourable Mr Justice Arnold surprised the European patent community with an unprecedented decision (Actavis Group HF and Eli Lilly & Company; Medis EHF and Eli Lilly & Company) where an English Court accepted jurisdiction to decide a declaratory non-infringement action relating to the UK, German, French, Italian and Spanish part…
When the legislation creating supplementary protection certificates (now consolidated in Regulation 469/2009/EC (the “SPC Regulation”)) was first introduced in 1993 no-one could have foreseen the deluge of CJEU references on the interpretation of this “uniform solution” that was to follow. As recently as autumn 2011, one might have expected (or at least hoped) that the…
On 10 October 2012, the Court of Appeal handed down its judgment in the case of MedImmune v Novartis*. This was the first of what is expected to be a series of decisions from the Court of Appeal over the next few months which will address how the question of obviousness should be tackled by…
Almost one year ago the European Court of Justice (CJEU) “clarified” the law on supplementary protection certificates. On November 24, 2011 it rendered its verdict in the “Medeva” case (C-322-10). One should not forget that “Georgetown” (C -422/10) was rendered on the same day and only one day later, the Yeda (C-518/10), Queensland (C-630/10) and…
