The pan-European litigation between Danish companies Danisco A/S (today a part of DuPont) and Novozymes A/S has been extensively reported in posts on this blog (12/08/2011; 21/09/2011; 10/01/2012; 09/07/2012; 03/08/2012). The litigation has involved Novozymes’ European Patent EP 1 804 592 B1 on the manufacture of certain enzyme-containing animal food pellets. In a decision announced…
On 30 July 2012, Commercial Court number 5 of Barcelona handed down an interesting decision that has brought again to the fore the legality of so-called “preparatory acts” (in particular, obtaining marketing authorisation and price). The facts of the case may be summarised as follows: Merck Sharpe & Dohme (“MSD”) owns a Supplementary Protection Certificate…
The Court of Justice ruled that claims against different companies located in different Member States marketing the same product regarding infringement of a a European patent in one jurisdiction were so closely connected that they may be decided jointly to prevent irreconcilable judgments in the sense of Art. 6(1) EC 44/2001. In the present circumstances,…
One of the recurrent topics in patent litigation in Spain is whether or not a Court can review the validity of a patent in the context of preliminary injunction proceedings. According to some Courts, life is too short in preliminary injunction proceedings. If the Court had to embark upon analysing the validity of the patent,…
Regarding the interpretation of “offering for the purpose” (of making, using etc.) in the sense of Article 53(1)(b) Dutch Patent Act, the Supreme Court held that offering has to be construed broadly and is not restricted to offering for sale. The defendant submitted its generic product for listing in G-Standaard, the database for medicinal products…
The Board decided that the introduction of the Rules of Procedure of the Boards of Appeal (RPBA) overruled prior case law on admission of new arguments not included in the grounds of appeal, as distinguished from new facts and evidence. The Board ruled that introduction of new arguments may violate Article 12(2) RPBA, which requires…
Regarding the gathering of evidence in French and foreign territories, the Paris Court of Appeal affirmed the appealed decision and acceded to defendant’s reasoning in ruling that (i) the ‘saisie-contrefaçon’ carried out on French territory on the basis of two patents was not deprived of its valid basis by the revocation of one of said…
The French Supreme Court for the first time recognized, as a general principle of French patent law, the estoppel “according to which a person may not contradict themselves to the detriment of another person” in the course of infringement proceedings. Click here for the full text of this case. A summary of this case will…
In 2007 in Nichia v Argos* the UK’s most senior full-time patents judge at the time, Jacob LJ, held that disclosure should no longer be available as a matter of course on standard issues such as obviousness in patent cases. This came as a breath of fresh air to many IP practitioners in the UK…
In the decision T 1621/09 of the Boards of Appeal of the EPO, it was decided that late filed arguments of the appellant amended the case to such an extent that their admittance lay within the Board’s discretion, even though the new arguments were based on facts and evidence already in the proceedings. Having found so the Board, exercising its discretion, did not admit the new arguments into the proceedings.
