In a recent judgement rendered by the Danish Maritime and Commercial Court (SH2018.T-3-16 – Hexa-Cover A/S et al v. Kirk Plast A/S et al), the court heard an infringement case based on the alleged infringement by virtue of the marketing and sale of a system of so-called floating tabs, which serve to provide a cover…
On 13 April 2018, the Barcelona Court of Appeal (Section 15) wrote a decision highly illustrative of the challenges that an “added matter” objection may raise in Spain, particularly in the context of preliminary injunction proceedings. The decision confirmed a ruling of 18 July 2017 from Barcelona Commercial Court number 4, which had lifted a…
The Finnish act on the right in inventions made at higher education institutions is in the process of being amended. The reason behind the underlying revision is to enhance the commercialisation of inventions at higher education institutions. Statistics on patents granted from 2013 to 2016 show that Finnish universities in general produced high-quality research and…
Since the Eli Lilly v. Canada award of 2017, the relevance of international investment law for patents has been known to a wider public. In response to the revocation of two Canadian patents concerning the compounds olanzapine and atomoxetine by Canadian courts, the US pharmaceutical company Eli Lilly initiated arbitral proceedings against Canada on the…
…great forces are up against each other and a dispute arises. Fortunately, it is not a war of biblical dimensions, but only a lawsuit, a significant and legally interesting one though, about an Supplementary Protection Certificate. The parties were Teva (Hebrew word for nature) and Gilead (aka Hill of Testimony, a mountainous region east of…
The Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) has clarified when a product is ‘protected by a basic patent’ within the meaning of article 3(a) of the SPC Regulation. In a long awaited preliminary ruling, the CJEU decided last week that: ‘Article 3(a) of Regulation No 469/2009 of the European Parliament and of the Council of 6 May…
Substantial evidence supported a jury’s finding that Raytheon Company failed to show that infrared imaging equipment manufacturers Indigo Systems and FLIR Systems Incorporated (collectively, “Indigo”) misappropriated trade secrets relating to sequential vacuum baking procedure and in situ solder sealing package assemblies, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit has ruled, because a reasonable…
The federal district court in Alexandria, Virginia, properly dismissed an inventor’s appeal of the Patent Trial and Appeal Board’s decisions rejecting six patent applications on the grounds of lack of utility and collateral estoppel, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit has held. The applications were directed to unproven cold fusion technology. One…
The United Kingdom wants to stay in the Unitary Patent system post-Brexit. This has been confirmed in the UK’s Brexit White Paper, which was published today. According to article 151 of the paper, ‘The UK has ratified the Unified Patent Court Agreement and intends to explore staying in the Court and unitary patent system after…
On 12 July 2017, the UK Supreme Court handed down a ruling which caused a shockwave to resound across the UK patent community. For more than a decade, when addressing the issue of the construction and infringement of a patent, every practitioner would have focussed on the question prescribed by Lord Hoffmann in Kirin Amgen:…
