The inventive step reflects a general patentability requirement in most patent laws, according to which an invention should be sufficiently inventive (not obvious in view of the prior art using the skilled person’s common general knowledge) in order to be patented / the patent to be held valid. In the United States, rather than ‘inventive step’, the expression ‘non-obviousness’ is used: is the invention an adequate distance beyond or above the state of the art? The assessment of the inventive step varies from one country to another. The European Patent Office uses the so-called problem-and-solution approach to assess inventive step, an instrument also used by several national European courts.
In nullity proceedings initiated by Accord Healthcare (“Accord”) the District Court of The Hague has held Shire-NPS Pharmaceuticals’ (“NPS”) patent EP 1 203 761, the basic patent for an SPC covering cinacalcet, invalid for lack of inventive step and declared the SPC null. In short, the court considered that the (selection of) cinacalcet provided no…
On 16 January 2019, the District Court of The Hague ruled that the Dutch part of Eli Lilly and Company’s patent EP 1 313 508 is valid. The judgment was handed down in an invalidation action brought by Sandoz International GmbH. EP 508 relates to the use of pemetrexed in combination therapy with vitamin B12…
The EPO’s Problem-Solution-Approach is, on the face of it, simple and widely applied also in the national jurisprudence of the EPC member states. It starts with the determination of a “closest prior art document” (CPAD) which is to serve as the starting point of the further analysis. It is then evaluated which technical differences exist…
Relevant prior art may prove not to be useful as a starting point for an attack on inventive step if the prior art teaching is negated by later studies before the effective date of the patent claims. In such a case, the skilled person would not have had an expectation of success. Case date:16 January…
The Court of Appeal upheld the first instance decision that the patent in suit lacked novelty and inventive step over the prior art. The Court confirmed, following Halliburton v Smith, that despite the fact the parties had reached a confidential settlement and Sony was not involved in the appeal, it was necessary to hear the…
The provision of a crystal form of a polymorphic substance, which the skilled person inevitably obtains if he uses a process suggested by the state of the art for the production of the substance, represents the result of activities to be expected by a skilled person and does not therefore by itself involve an inventive…
The court solved the question of inventive step using the problem-solution approach, defining the objective technical problem without including a pointer to the solution of the problem. This, however, did not help the patentee, since the solution to the problem was already to be found in the common general knowledge and was used in similar…
The number of inventive step attacks in opposition procedures at the European Patent Office may be constrained in the future due to a recent change in the EPO Guidelines. According to David Brophy, partner at FRKelly, the change will improve efficiency, although the restrictions may also open up a new avenue for criticising decisions on…
The FCJ confirmed that inventive step is to be acknowledged if the feature(s) distinguishing the claimed invention from the starting point for the assessment of inventive step are not directly and unambiguously derivable or at least rendered obvious by the prior art. This applies equally to functional features. Case number: X ZR 51/06 Case date: 29…
AstraZeneca had filed an application for interim relief based on two patents, DK/EP 1250138 T4 (“EP 138”) and DK/EP 2266573 T3 (“EP 573”) against Sandoz, which conceded that to the extent that the patents were valid, the Sandoz product “Fulvestrant Sandoz” infringed upon the two patents. Sandoz took the position, however, that the patents should…
