A judgment of 13 July 2017 from the Spanish Supreme Court (Civil Chamber) has highlighted the importance of taking the fine pencil when examining novelty. The decision stemmed from a judgment of 12 September 2014 from the Barcelona Court of Appeal (Section 15), which had declared patent ES 2.344.241 invalid due to lack of novelty….
The Patent Trial and Appeal Board’s construction of the term “body” disclosed in multiple claims of a downhole drilling tool patent has been reversed by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit as unreasonably overbroad and contrary to descriptions in the patent’s specification. The Board’s rejection of the challenged claims following inter partes…
A data sequence can only be regarded as a product directly obtained by a patent-protected process if it has tangible technical properties that are directly imparted on it by this method, and if the data sequence itself can therefore be appropriate subject-matter of a product patent. The representation of an experimental result obtained by a…
In China, judges handling patent litigations often experience difficulties in claim construction and infringement determination due to the lack of technical backgrounds. Although forensic appraisals were then widely adopted to help judges identify professional facts, some downsides were observed in the technical appraisal system. As for the expert auxiliary system, it is playing a more…
For the first time, the Spanish Supreme Court made far-reaching observations on key issues of the assessment of inventive step and, in particular, on a) the reformulation of the “objective technical problem” as defined in the patent’s specification, b) the limits to the combination of prior art documents and c) the professional qualifications required for…
Substantial evidence supported a Patent Trial and Appeal Board decision finding a patent for an eyewear retention device unpatentable as obvious, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit has held. A prior art device created by a fisherman and described in a newspaper article made use of a “resilient” retainer—as claimed by the…
The Preparatory Committee of the Unified Patent Court has been making ‘good progress’ regarding the ratification of the UPCA. In an update posted on its website today, the Preparatory Committee announces: ‘We now have 14 full ratifications and more in the pipeline, making it reasonable to expect that we will begin operations with closer to…
When analysing inventive activity, one risk that appears to be here to stay is that of hindsight. As Richard Ebbink very aptly put it in a workshop held at the INGRES Institute in Zurich on 8 and 9 September 2017 in honour of Dr. Dieter Brändle – the first President of the Swiss Federal Patent…
In the first period of functioning of the Unified Patent Court, the judge-rapporteur – who has important powers in the new system – should as much as possible revert issues to the panel of judges as a whole. This is beneficial for the system and can prevent forum shopping, according to the Belgian judge Sam…
In its research concerning the complaint that was filed against ratification of the Unified Patent Court Agreement, the German Federal Constitutional Court (FCC) gave a series of mainly German institutions and associations the opportunity to submit their views. A spokesman of the Court, the Bundesverfassungsgericht, declared in answer to questions of Kluwer IP Law that a…
