The Patent Trial and Appeal Board’s construction of a key claim term in a patent directed to a method for fabricating a self-aligned contact hole in a semiconductor circuit was overbroad in light of the actual claim language and specification, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit has held. Because a prior art…
by Bernward Zollner It is often worthwhile to read again former judgments of the German Bun-desgerichtshof. In a judgment of 13 July 2010 – docket no. Xa ZR 126/07 – the court has discussed a patent on a staple cartridge for staples for surgical purposes (“Klam-mernahtgerät”). The court has stated that a disclosure is enabling…
Estonia has ratified the Unified Patent Court Agreement. According to the website of the European Council, it completed the ratification formalities on 1 August 2017. Estonia joins Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, Denmark, Finland, France, Italy, Luxembourg, Malta, the Netherlands, Portugal and Sweden as one of the thirteen countries who have completed their ratification processes. Ratification by…
In paragraph 54 of its judgment of 12 July 2017, the UK Supreme Court wrote that “[…] notwithstanding what Lord Diplock said in Catnic [1982] RPC 183, 242, a problem of infringement is best approached by addressing two issues, each of which is to be considered through the eyes of the notional addressee of the…
In this case the FCJ considered the question of whether one of the co-owners of an invention is individually entitled to file a patent application for that invention. The Court held that in general an application is not permissible if it is made only in the name and on behalf of that co-owner. In such…
The UPC IT team has called on business and service providers to provide information about how they want to integrate their systems with the case management system (CMS) of the UPC, and what services they plan to provide their clients. ‘As an initial step the team would like to hear from those whose responsibility it…
The recent Apple v. Baili case has generated a wide interest in design patents. This article discusses developments on judicial standards for determining design patent infringement applied in Apple v. Baili, and some implications from this case. Such standards involve how to determine distinctive features, what to be considered to differentiate a functional feature, what…
UPDATE with quotes of the press conference of Michel Barnier at the bottom of this blogpost Will London’s pharmaceuticals and life sciences section of the Unified Patent Court have to be relocated post-Brexit? The EU will investigate this as part of the Brexit negotiations. This has been reported by ScienceBusiness.net. According to the website, the…
By Gregory Bacon Yes, you read that right. Thirteen years after the House of Lords had firmly shut the door on any notion of a doctrine extending the scope of patent protection outside the claims, the UK Supreme Court in yesterday’s judgment in Actavis v Eli Lilly [2017] UKSC 48 reversed gear and reintroduced a…
When this author published his blog of 27 June 2017, a reader kindly sent in a comment pointing out that as this author had not inserted the word “Spanish” before “Supreme Court”, and the blog was written in English, the reader had been misled; he initially thought that the judgment discussed had been issued by…
