In a judgment in preliminary proceedings the Bundespatentgericht (German Federal Patent Court) granted the pharmaceutical company Merck the right to use European patent EP 1 422 218 and to continue sales of the AIDS drug Isentress in Germany. It is the first time in its 55-year history that the Bundespatentgericht granted a compulsory patent license…
The Patent Trial and Appeal Board did not err when it concluded that the claims of a patent relating to the use of descriptive text combined with a rollover viewing area in the user interface of an Internet search engine were unpatentable as obvious in light of prior art, the U.S. Court of Appeals for…
The UK Patents Court upheld the validity of Wyeth’s patent EP(UK) 2,343,308 relating to a combination product comprising a 2086 protein and a PorA protein used in meningitis B vaccines, rejecting GSK’s allegations of lack of entitlement to two of the claimed priority dates, lack of novelty, obviousness (both conventional and so-called “AgrEvo” obviousness), insufficiency…
The High Court has granted the Claimants’ request for declarations of non-infringement (“DNIs”) regarding several national designations of the Defendant’s European Patent for a pemetrexed disodium and vitamin B12 combination in respect of reconstitution of the Claimants’ lyophilised pemetrexed product when reconstituted in dextrose solution. The issues in this case were remitted by the Court…
The Federal Court of Justice held that the defence of the patent in suit on the basis of claims filed only at the appeal stage as an auxiliary request can nevertheless be considered to be expedient if the Patent Court had only informed the Defendant in the oral proceedings that it no longer intended to…
The Federal Supreme Court confirmed the Federal Patent Court’s three-step function, accessibility and equal value test to analyse infringement under the doctrine of equivalents. A full summary of this case has been published on Kluwer IP Law.
The Spanish Parliament, the Congreso de los Diputados, surprisingly adopted a non-binding motion on 7 March 2017, requesting the government to join the Unitary Patent system. Spain has been the only EU member state to stay completely out of this new European patent system, that is expected to start functioning in December of this year…
The Spanish parliament will vote today on a non-binding motion of the socialist opposition party PSOE, which calls on the government to reconsider joining the Unitary Patent system. The motion was filed last month by MP Patricia Blanquer. According to Blanquer, Spain should no longer stay on the side-line now that the system is about…
1 Background In the past several years, the Supreme People’s Court (“SPC”) of China has been working on establishing a precedent system appropriate for China. In 2010, the SPC launched the Guiding Cases System (“GCS”). Under the GCS, the SPC each year selects and publishes certain representative cases from all level of courts as Guiding…
One of the objectives of the new Patents Act that is to come into force on 1 April 2017 is to prompt a higher level of specialization of Judges dealing with patent cases. In particular, article 118 assigns jurisdiction to hear patent cases to a sub-group of Courts within the general group of “Commercial Courts”…
