by Stephan Lieck The Düsseldorf Regional Court had to decide whether it is misleading under competition law that the former proprietor of a patent advertises with the fact that there is patent protection for a product (wrongful representation of an article as patent-ed/arrogation of patent), although the patent had expired at the time of arrogation…
There seems to be ample consensus in that Justice is better administered by specialised Judges than by non-specialised Judges. With this view in mind, in 1993 the Barcelona Court of Appeal took a groundbreaking step forward by conferring exclusive competence to one section (Section 15) to hear appeals filed in intellectual property cases. The successful…
The Enlarged Board of Appeal (EBA) allowed review of the conduct of the Technical Board of Appeal (TBA), since the TBA rejected a main request for lack of inventive step which had not yet been discussed during oral proceedings. The EBA decided that the petitioner had no reason to assume that the TBA would decide…
AstraZeneca filed a request with the Patent Office (PO) for the publication in the PO’s official bullet of a court judgment invalidating a previous PO’s decision regarding the termination of one of AstraZeneca’s patents. The PO denied AstraZeneca’s request for publication due to a pending procedure for the issuance of a supplementary protection certificate (SPC)…
The Enlarged Board confirmed that a Technical Board of Appeal may refuse a request that is filed with the grounds of opposition if – upon request by the opposition division – the applicant has declined to file such a request during first instance proceedings and there is no reason why such request could not have…
The English High Court has recently ruled on the appropriateness of staying validity and infringement proceedings pending a Technical Board of Appeal (“TBA”) decision of the European Patent Office (“EPO”), and on using disclosed documents in parallel foreign proceedings. The parties involved have had a number of skirmishes recently in various courts throughout the world….
As stated already in one my earlier posts (here), Legislative Decree no. 131/2010 has introduced a new procedural tool in the Italian IP litigation scenario. New Art. 128 of the Italian IP Code now allows the conduction of a Preliminary Technical Assessment (PTA). In practice, as an alternative to commencing ordinary proceedings or preliminary injunction…
As per January 1, 2012 the Swiss Federal Patent Court became effective. The Federal Patent Court is exclusively competent for: a. validity and infringement disputes and actions for issuing a license in respect of patents; b. ordering preliminary measures prior to the filing of a complaint as defined in letter a; c. the enforcement of…
Among many other tasks, the Danish Government when taking over the EU Presidency as of 1 January took over the continued challenges (and problems) in connection with securing a compromise that may lead to a Unified Patent Court. Despite the intentions of the Polish presidency to land a compromise during its tenure, the issue remains…
The general rule in UK litigation is that the successful party is entitled to its costs. One exception to this rule, peculiar to patent cases, is a so-called ‘Earth Closet’ order. If an alleged infringer introduces a new piece of prior art, after service of its original Grounds of Invalidity, an Earth Closet order enables…
