The Federal Court of Justice held that: The sequence of steps in a method claim is normally determined by the claim’s wording. A completely new attack based on a document only filed upon appeal is too late and not to be admitted on appeal. Case date: 09 May 2017 Case number: X ZR 97/15 Court: Federal Court of…
The choice of the starting point for evaluation of inventive step requires a justification which is not in itself provided by the fact that a certain citation proves ex post to be the “closest state of the art”. In particular, it cannot be assumed without further ado that an expert in a technical field in…
The federal district court in Tampa did not err in deciding on summary judgment that fishing boat manufacturer Yellowfin Yachts failed to establish that a former executive and his company were liable for trade dress infringement, unfair competition, or trade secret misappropriation, the U.S. Court of Appeals in Atlanta has held, affirming summary judgment in…
In a challenge to Facebook’s patent application for a method for arranging images contiguously in an array, a prior art reference—a patent application filed by Perrodin that related to placing images on a grid and did not require contiguity in response to resizing or rearranging in all cases—could not have disclosed the limitation of Facebook’s…
Barcelona Commercial Court no. 5 handed down a judgment quashing the claimant’s DNI action without ruling on the merits of (non-)infringement. The Court found that the claimant had standing to file the DNI. However, one of the procedural pre-requisites for a DNI action had not been met: the claimant was neither industrially exploiting any actual…
Upon reading the title of this blog entry, readers may be wondering what the “ex re ipsa” doctrine involves. It therefore may be worth clarifying that it is a legal doctrine applied, for example, to cases dealing with damages, where the damage is presumed to have been caused (“causality”) when it is inherent to the…
Nullity Plaintiff still has a need for legal relief even after expiry of the patent as long as Patentee has not given up claims against customers of Plaintiff. A conventional personal computer with telephone functions does not render obvious to implement one of its features in a mobile phone. Case date: 16 January 2018 Case number: X…
Following the Court of Appeal’s decision that two of Regeneron’s patents were valid and infringed, it refused to grant Kymab permission to appeal to the Supreme Court, but held that the injunction against Kymab should be stayed, subject to certain conditions, whilst Kymab applied directly to the Supreme Court for permission to appeal. The Court…
The Federal Court of Justice held that in utility model registration proceedings, the utility model department must examine whether one of the grounds for refusal listed in Sec. 2 Utility Model Law exists. Further, the exclusion of utility model protection for methods is in accordance with Article 14.1 and Article 3.1 of the Basic Law….
On March 27th, 2018, the Court of Appeal of Paris issued a decision on withdrawal of the seizure order on the grounds that the principle of impartiality had been violated since the patent attorneys (“CPIs”) assisting the bailiff wrote a report on the probability of the infringement annexed at the seizure request. It will thus…
