Revocation of a patent concerns a mechanism which provides for an inter partes review of the validity of a. At the European Patent Office a patent can be revoked by the Opposition Division or Boards of Appeal. A notice of opposition has to be filed within nine months from the publication of the mention of the grant of a European patent. In 2000 Article 105a was introduced in the European Patent Convention, providing centralised limitation and revocation procedures at the level of the EPO, which allows the patent proprietor either to have the claims of his granted patent limited or to have the whole patent revoked for all its designated states. The effect of this central revocation is that the patent in question is deemed never to have existed. It is revoked ex tunc.
If a party decides to participate in another party’s challenge to a patent so it may share in the benefits of a victory, it may well be ordered to share the costs burden of losing. Actavis was therefore ordered to pay half of Eli Lilly’s costs of successfully defending the revocation actions brought by Dr…
The German Federal Court of Justice (BGH) recently further confirmed the basic tendency of bringing national case law into line with that of the European Patent Office. In the decision “Wiedergabe topographischer Informationen” (Reproduction of topographical information)BGH.Wiedergabe.topografischer.Informationen.X.ZR.47-07, the Federal Court of Justice had to deal with a method and device for the perspective display of…
The District Court of The Hague passed judgment today in a case between Sandoz and Glaxo regarding a combination patent held by Glaxo. The judgment comprises an extensive “lecture” on the assessment of inventive step and may become a benchmark for future cases.
Do we need a Community Patent? Do we need a European Patent Litigation System? Or does the current fragmented system have a hidden wisdom behind it? Judge for yourself!
The Appellant had obtained both utility model and patent protection for a mechanical invention. The Defendant argued that the subject matter of both rights did not fulfil the novelty requirement, because it had been disclosed to the public by demonstrations of the invention to both individual persons and corporate entities prior to the priority date….
When challenging the validity of a patent, a decision needs to be made early on as to grounds on which to rely. When it comes to allegations of anticipation and obviousness, the challenger and its advisers will need to consider whether to rely or just one or two prior art citations or to include a…
There have not been many decisions in 2010 from the English Patents Court that are likely to be regarded in future decades as seminal judgments. However, in the author’s view, the judgment of the Court of Appeal of 28 July 2010 in Schlumberger Holdings Limited v Electromagnetic Geoservices AS is likely to be cited frequently…
In a case involving the US multinational Mars and an Italian producer of rice (Riseria Monferrato), the Court of Appeal of Turin, by decision of 19 November 2008, tackled – one of the few cases in Italian case law – the interesting issue of the difference between discoveries and inventions and their patentability. The case…
The Court of Appeal of Milan established a principle whereby named inventors must be called in revocation actions and, if they are not, proceedings may not reach the stage of decision. This principle, which may sound strange to practitioners of other jurisdictions, is based on Art. 122, paragraph 4, of the Italian IP Code, according…
Separating and testing the two enantiomers of a chiral molecule having an already-known therapeutic effect in order to identify the active enantiomer, evaluating its specific therapeutic effect and finally recommending, through the patent, its use for an identical but better-quality therapeutic effect, involves no inventive step.
