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…

The Court confirmed that a District court, not specialised in patent matters, does have relative jurisdiction to decide a motion to produce exhibits for determining patent infringement. In order to positively decide a motion to produce exhibits, (threat of) infringement should be made plausible, but the threshold for plausibility is relatively low. Further, technical details…

Why would anyone want to have their own supplementary protection certificate (SPC) revoked? – The answer is, quite simply, Article 3(c). Under Article 3(c) of Regulation (EC) 469/2009 on SPCs for medicinal products (and, likewise, under Article 3(1)(c) of Regulation (EC) 1610/96 on SPCs for plant protection products), an SPC shall be granted only if…

The District Court of the Hague granted a provisional injunction against Sandoz’ generic darunavir product. As it was already offered in the G-standard, price erosion was an imminent danger for which a provisional injunction was warranted, and the SPC appeared to be valid having been held so in the parallell procedure before the UK court….

On November 5th 2018 the Eastern High Court of Denmark ruled in favor of Hollister Inc. in a case regarding an invention described in a patent claim filed by Hollister Inc. Coloplast A/S claimed they were co-inventors of the invention and therefore co-owners of it. However, the Eastern High Court found that Coloplast had failed…

Over the past few years the pan-European and parallel national patent litigation based on Eli Lilly’s pemetrexed patent has attracted considerable attention, as it has resulted in a number of diverse land mark decisions in relation to the doctrine of equivalence, as evidenced by the various posts on the Kluwer Patent Blog. By way of…

Today, after nine months of waiting, the decision of the UK Supreme Court in the pregabalin litigation was handed down. Like Brexit and the nation, it is clear that the Supreme Court Judges were divided on several crucial issues. In this post, we will not attempt to give a detailed analysis of the decision but…

The assignor of a patented network security logging device that “broadcast” network security threats was not estopped from initiating an inter partes review of the patent, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit has determined. However, the court also ruled that the Patent Trial and Appeal Board, in invalidated some of the patent’s…