Introduction by Brian Cordery and Rik Lambers “As many readers will know, the English High Court ruled on a legal challenge as to whether the government could trigger Article 50 of the Lisbon Treaty without parliamentary approval. The post below by Maria Kendrick explains that the Judges ruled broadly that parliament is supreme in UK constitutional…
by Steven Willis Yesterday, the Court of Appeal handed down its decision in Idenix v Gilead [2016] EWCA Civ 1089, a dispute involving SOVALDI® (sofosbuvir), which is sold by Gilead as a treatment for chronic hepatitis C infection in adults. At first instance, Arnold J held (in an epic 621 paragraph judgment) that Idenix’s Patent…
In this case the FCJ expanded on earlier case law regarding claim construction and in particular on the issue of whether a certain embodiment would fall within the scope of protection by way of equivalence if the specification in the patent described various options, but only incorporated one of those options into the claim wording….
A district court did not err in dismissing an inventor’s claim that CBS Corporation, its CBS Interactive subsidiary, and “others under the control or direction of an independent contractor” hired by CBS to produce the television show “Big Brother” infringed two patents relating to methods and systems for obtaining real time responses from a broadcast…
An EPO board held that, during opposition proceedings, copies of complaints about file specific issues sent by a party to EPO departments other than the opposition division, as well as the responses to these complaints, should be sent to the other party. The other party also needs to be notified of complaints about the work…
Earlier this year, the Commercial Courts of Barcelona published a decision which shows that patent owners cannot obtain “Diligencias para la comprobación de hechos” (“Proceedings for the Verification of Facts”; a procedure roughly equivalent to the French “Saisie-contrafaçon“) in Spain unless they carefully prove that the application fulfils certain conditions. In particular, in its Decision…
A federal district court did not err in finding that a “cow monitoring system” developed by Netherlands-based Agis Automatisering did not infringe the “rumination” and “estrus” patents held by VocalTag Ltd. and SCR Engineering Ltd., respectively, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit has ruled. The district court’s grant of summary judgment to…
A technical teaching making use of a discovery, e.g. of a natural law, for achieving a particular result is patent-eligible, irrespective of whether or not it has an “inventive excess” beyond the purposeful exploitation of the natural law. A full summary of this case has been published on Kluwer IP Law.
The asserted claims of a DuPont patent disclosing a process for preparing flexographic printing plates were invalid as obvious over prior art and therefore could not support infringement contentions against DuPont’s competitor, MacDermid Printing Solutions, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit has held. In addition, MacDermid’s Digital CST printing plates did not…
Therapeutic effect of a 2-10mg once yearly dosage regimen is made plausible by an example showing clinical effect of dosage regimens of 0.25, 0.50 and 1mg per three months, 2.0 mg every six months and 4.0 mg once a year. For the purpose of the problem-solution approach, two documents describing a treatment of diseases which…
