The District Court of The Hague declares the Dutch part of Bayer’s European Patent covering Anti-TNF alpha human monoclonal antibodies invalid. The Court considers that the patent covers high affinity antibodies. However, the Court finds that such type of antibodies is not sufficiently disclosed in the patent specification, and therefore invalidates the patent as a…
The Thessaloniki Court of Appeal held in nullity proceedings that the patent, covering ornamental light devices, lacked both novelty and inventive step. The patented subject matter was found to be known in the market and circulating in trade prior to the date of filing the application for patent protection. A full summary of this case…
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…
The question at issue was whether a verbal preparatory agreement between the parties on a patented invention had given rise to a valid license agreement and ensuing entitlement to damages. The Supreme Court affirmed an earlier Court of Appeals decision, for the most part, by finding that a (patent) license agreement must be in written…
The court held that the plaintiff who is listed as proprietor of the patent in the patent register is allowed to claim both injunctive relief and damages as well as claims to rendering accounts and provision of information to prepare the damage claim for all infringing acts committed during the time of his/her enlistment, despite…
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….
Atanas filed a patent application for a ‘Gravity Power System’. The Bulgarian Patent Office (BPO) dismissed the application because the claimed invention was not industrially applicable and therefore not patentable as the system’s principle of functioning was contrary to the law of energy conservation, i.e. the system would always need an external force in order…
The Court of Appeal has held that the skilled person (which can be a team of individuals) may vary depending on the question in issue (e.g. obviousness, novelty, sufficiency or construction). The patents in suit taught the use of marine Controlled Source Electromagnetic (“CSEM”) surveying to locate oil or gas. For the purposes of sufficiency…
In this case the Supreme Court affirmed that the transfer of a computer program could be regarded as an act of indirect patent infringement. Although the commissioned research and development of the program was covered by the experimental use/research exemption, a majority of three judges held that the transfer of the results of such research…
