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Back to sad old days at the European Patent Office. Last Thursday, hundreds of EPO staff members protested outside the Portuguese Embassy in The Hague against the lack of justice and deteriorating working conditions at the EPO. They are also concerned about the way the management is pushing for reforms without proper consultation of staff…
The jurisprudence of the Court of Justice for the European Union is not excluding the possibility to allow a non-EU Member State forming part of the UPCA. This is one of the conclusions in ‘EU Patent and Brexit’, a research paper which was requested by the European Parliament’s Committee on Legal Affairs and commissioned, overseen…
The Federal Court of Justice rejected a joint request by the parties to stay proceedings because of ongoing settlement negotiations. It held that the parties’ request had been made too late and was therefore no longer considered appropriate. The parties should have taken the scheduling of the hearing, but at the latest the approaching of…
The compatibility of the Unified Patent Court Agreement (UPCA) and two pieces of draft legislation submitted for its ratification in Germany with the German Constitution was examined only very selectively, whereas the compatibility with EU law was apparently not examined at all. This is the conclusion of the Düsseldorf based patent lawyer Ingve Björn Stjerna,…
The Supreme Court handed down its judgment on 23 October 2019, marking the end of a 13-year struggle between the inventor, Prof Ian Shanks, and Unilever for compensation in relation to an invention relating to disposable glucose monitoring equipment. The judgment of the Supreme Court provides valuable guidance on the matters to be taken into…
Traveling back from an interesting and lively VPP meeting on a train at dawn through beautiful, lonesome parts of Germany, full of large forests hosting mythical creatures that made it into the fairy tales of the Grimm Brothers, I felt somehow elated. So let me use this momentum to refresh our spirits by debunking three…
In another post (here) I have discussed the procedure for seeking post grant limitation in the framework of Italian court proceedings, and the closing line of that post mentioned that another interesting point of discussion would be when such post-grant limitation should take effect vis-à-vis infringers. In fact, a few decisions have touched this issue…
A Turkish company active in the automotive sector filed a patent infringement action against a German global automotive company. The Turkish company alleged that a system used in the cars of the German company was infringing its non-examined patent granted by the Turkish Patent and Trademark Office (‘TPTO’). As a counter-attack, the German company and…
A jury’s verdict that snowmobile frame patents asserted against Arctic Cat were indefinite and invalid as anticipated or obvious was supported by substantial evidence. A federal district court correctly upheld a jury verdict invalidating two Bombardier Recreational Products Inc. snowmobile frame patents because substantial evidence supported the jury’s findings that Bombardier’s patent related to rider…
In a complex and interesting validity and infringement case, the Barcelona Court of Appeals (Section 15), Spain’s most experienced patent court, tackles a plethora of issues: linguistic interpretation of European patents; long-time tolerance of patent infringement; assignee estoppel vis-à-vis third parties; claim construction; and indirect evidence of (non)-infringement of a product claim in cases where,…
