As previously reported, the Patents County Court was re-launched on 1 October 2010 under the auspices of His Honour Judge Birss QC. The issue of transferring proceedings between the Patents Court of the High Court and Patents County Court was the subject of numerous disputes before the Patents County Court before it was re-launched and…
The new French law implementing the London Protocol is immediately applicable, even to European patents granted before the entry into force of this new law. The Court held that the new law was procedural and should, as such, be enforced immediately with retroactive effect. A full summary of this case has been published on Kluwer…
The Enlarged Board of Appeal answered the question referred to it by the Board of Appeal in J 2/08. The Enlarged Board of Appeal held that after a decision to refuse a European patent application, the application remains pending, in the sense that a divisional application can be validly filed, until the expiry of the…
In the past, Italian courts have regularly dismissed motions for interlocutory (pre trial) declaratory judgements of non infringement in IP cases. The firm belief of the courts was that interlocutory proceedings could not be used to obtain DJ orders for a number of procedural reasons. The Scott Paper decisions of the Italian provincial court of…
European patent practitioners are welcoming the news that the EPO Administrative Council reached a decision on 26 October 2010 to extend the period for responding to a communication under Rule 161 EPC from one month to six months as of 1 May 2011. Since 1 April 2010, practitioners have been put under considerable pressure as…
There are three compulsory rules you must observe when challenging a judge on grounds of bias: 1) Be prepared. 2) Use good reasons. 3) Have a worthy goal. I wish to exemplify this by a hearing I had just recently: As some of you may know, the current presiding judge of the appeal board for…
One of the strategies used by manufacturers of generic drugs to try to capture the market of the “reference product” when the patent protecting the latter expires is to present the generic as a cheap alternative to the “reference product”. This raises several interesting questions, such as whether or not a generics company, for the…
The Italian Antitrust Authority (Autorità Garante della concorrenza e del mercato) announced on 26 October that it commenced proceedings against Pfizer following a complaint filed by Ratiopharm alleging that Pfizer’s behaviour in the enforcement of its patent rights amounts to abuse of a dominant position. It is too soon to make comments on this case….
Like other countries, such as Australia or Germany, a “petty” patent or “utility model” can be obtained in Spain for so-called minor inventions. They present a twofold distinction with regard to “full-fledged” patents, when it comes to examining their patentability: (i) only documents disclosed in Spain form part of the state of the art; (ii)…
In this blog I report about how the Bundesgerichtshof (BGH) has recently eliminated some potential for conflicting decisions in Germany’s bifurcated patent litigation system. The separation of infringement and invalidity proceedings is the basis for what we call the “mouse and elephant strategy”. In the infringement proceedings the patentee tries to establish a scope of…
