The Federal Court of Justice (Bundesgerichtshof) ruled that a defendant in a patent infringement suit may successfully raise an antitrust defense against the issue of an injunction where the asserted patent is standard-essential and the defendant has tried to obtain a license to the patent under reasonable conditions. The full summary of this case has been published…
For an invention to be considered obvious it is usually necessary that there are additional incentives that go beyond the identification of the technical problem and lead the person skilled in the art to search the solution for this technical problem on the path of the invention. A full summary of this case has been…
The Federal Court of Justice ruled that the subject matter of a patent does not extend beyond the content of the application as filed when terms are used in the claims that are not literally used in the application text but are summarizing words for longer descriptions in the application as filed. A full summary…
A patent infringement action may not be rejected on the grounds that a feature of the asserted patent claim seems to be unclear in its technical meaning. A lack of clarity may only give reason to limit the feature to the narrowest reasonable meaning. The full summary of this case has been published on Kluwer IP Law.
The Federal Court of Justice held that a licensee’s failure to exploit an exclusive patent license can justify termination of the license agreement by the licensor, even if there is no breach of contract or default by the licensee. From an objective licensor’s perspective, however, there must be no prospect of an improvement in the…
The Federal Patent Court has decided that an inventive step according to Article 56 EPC is not established if the person skilled in the art has only to conduct routine exploratory analysis based on the prior art. Against this legal background the Federal Patent Court nullified the patent in suit arguing that in a situation…
The Federal Court of Justice clarified the interdependencies of its case law concerning computer implemented inventions. An application has technical character if a non technical feature is inserted in a technical process. The comprehensive inspection of the object of the application does not allow discretionary weighing of technical and nontechnical parts. Due to the exemption…
