In most systems, a patent is valid for 20 years from the filing date of the patent application. Patents are granted with a presumption of validity but no patent is safe from being challenged and declared (partially) invalid by national courts or, in the case of European patents, revoked by the European Patent Office. Often, a claim of invalidity of a patent is a reaction to an action of the patentee, in particular an infringement action.
A 1 July 2009 decision of the Tribunal de Grande Instance of Paris illustrates how the French courts proceed when they are seised of a nullity claim of the French designation of a European patent against which opposition may be filed or opposition proceedings are pending.
In a case involving the US multinational Mars and an Italian producer of rice (Riseria Monferrato), the Court of Appeal of Turin, by decision of 19 November 2008, tackled – one of the few cases in Italian case law – the interesting issue of the difference between discoveries and inventions and their patentability. The case…
The German Federal Court of Justice decided that a method concerning the dynamic document generation of structured documents in a client-server-environment, which is implemented by software, was not excluded from patent protection as a program for data processing systems. A method is always of technical nature if it concerns the direct interaction of elements of…
This matter concerns levocetirizine, which is an enantiomer of cetirizine. The Court held that, at the priority date, it would have been obvious to the skilled person to check whether levocetirizine (which had been individually disclosed before the priority date) had improved pharmacological characteristics compared to the racemic mixture (i.e. cetirizine). As a rule, resolving…
Separating and testing the two enantiomers of a chiral molecule having an already-known therapeutic effect in order to identify the active enantiomer, evaluating its specific therapeutic effect and finally recommending, through the patent, its use for an identical but better-quality therapeutic effect, involves no inventive step.
In this case the Court of Appeal of Lyon affirmed the first French judgement granting an interlocutory injunction to prevent imminent infringement of a patent. The President of the First Instance Court had not considered any argument relating to the validity of the patent, and decided that in summary proceedings, only the existence of the…
The German Federal Court of Justice has maintained Microsoft’s patent relating to alternative handling of short and long filenames. In the first instance, the Federal Patent Court considered the teaching of the patent not inventive over the Rock Ridge Interchange Protocol used for CD-ROMs. However, supported by a court expert the Federal Court of Justice…
By decision no. 9291 of 19 April 2010, the Italian Supreme Court clarified that the sale of a single unit of the patented product is novelty destroying under Art. 46 of the Italian IP Code, which provides that an invention is new if it is not comprised in the state of art and that this…
Sufficiency of disclosure is one of the requirements for the grant of a European patent (Art. 83 EPC). The disclosure in a patent specification shall enable the skilled person to apply the invention, i.e. to make the claimed product or apply the claimed process. A claimed product or process is often defined in general terms…
Two recent decisions of the Italian Supreme Court (no. 21835 of 14 October 2009 and no. 23414 of 4 November 2009) have tackled the issue of sufficiency in a peculiar manner, departing from previous case law. In both decisions, it is stated that “the protection granted by a patent presupposes, besides the requirements of novelty…
