The Brazilian Patent and Trademark Office (BRPTO) has issued a new set of guidelines to clarify its recent regulations on amending patent claims during the appellate phase and help patent applicants adapt to the new policy. Last month, we published an article regarding the decision rendered by the President of the BRPTO on 12 December…
In its judgment of 7 November 2017, X ZR 63/15 – Digitales Buch, the German FCJ (Bundesgerichtshof) took the opportunity to complete its Kommunikationskanal case law on the admissibility of a generalisation of a teaching in patent claims by the omission of specific features that have been taught in the examples of the patent application….
Case reported and summarized by Gregory Bacon, Bristows LLP Mr Justice Carr is only a few months into his judicial career, but having already provided welcome guidance on the role of plausibility in considering both the questions of inventive step and sufficiency (see earlier blog post on Actavis v Eli Lilly), he has now produced…
The judgement “Schleifprodukt” rendered by the German Federal Court of Justice on 25 November 2014 could be seen as a step towards harmonisation with the EPO because the court carried out the test for the admissibility of claim amendments by assessing whether the feature combination of the amended claim in its entirety represents a technical teaching which is identifiable from the original application as being suitable for achieving the effects of the invention.
The Board of Appeal ruled that color figures contained in the application when filed could be used as a basis for amendments. The board had to deal with the problem that no original copy of the color figures was available to the board. Therefore, the board considered it appropriate to compare sets of copies of…
Syngenta Limited (hereinafter referred to as “Syngenta”), a company governed by the laws of England and Wales, is the holder of European patent No. 0 382 375 entitled “Fungicides”. On 28 September 2009, it submitted to the Institut national de la propriété industrielle (INPI; French Industrial Property Office) a request for limitation of a claim of the French designation of…
August and September are traditionally vacation months in the English Courts although the Patents Court can and often does sit in September. As a result of this, not many judgments are handed down in these months. However on 5th September 2012, the Court of Appeal handed down an important and very interesting decision in the…
The objection raised by the opponent that the protected subject matter of a divisional application extends beyond the content of the parent application does not represent a “fresh ground for opposition”,. This bbecause in the present case i.c. the opposition division hadhas earlier raised an unrelated objection earlier, holdinstating that the patent based on the…
The German Federal Court of Justice (FCJ) issued a nullity appeal judgment on 12 July 2011 in which the requirements for an amendment to be held allowable under Art. 123(2) EPC and Sec. 38 German Patent Act seem to have been further tightened as opposed to the previous practice. The decision (case number X ZR…
On August 30, 2011 the Enlarged Board of Appeal rendered its decision on the admissibility of a disclaimer whose subject-matter is disclosed as an embodiment of the invention in the application as filed. It can be expected that the EPO will change its current restrictive practice in view of this decision, again allowing disclaimers for disclosed subject-matter under certain conditions. However, the Enlarged Board of Appeal did not endorse the view that disclaiming disclosed subject-matter is always allowable. Hence, until further Board of Appeal decisions will bring more clarity as to the specific situations in which such disclaimers are allowable, there will remain a degree of uncertainty.
