European Union

(Rospatt Osten Pross)/

by Dr. André Sabellek In a recent judgment the Higher Regional Court of Düsseldorf (OLG Düsseldorf) had to deal with the application of the “Specific Mechanism” for parallel imports of pharmaceuticals if those pharmaceuticals are protected by a supplementary protection certificate (SPC) (judgment of August 6, 2015, court docket: 2 U 21/15 – Ezetimib, <http://www.duesseldorfer-archiv.de/?q=node/6461>)….

United States of America

(CCH)/

A patent holder’s application to reissue his patent with altered, broader claims was properly rejected by a patent examiner and the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office Patent Trial and Appeal Board based on the anticipation of the claims by prior art, according to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit (In re Taylor,…

Case Law, Spain

(Clifford Chance)/

The assessment of inventive step is a legal assessment which can be reviewed by the Supreme Court through what is known as the “cassational appeal”. The Supreme Court confirms the validity and suitability of the “problem-and-solution approach” to assess the inventive step requirement and that it is not sufficient that the expert in the field…

Case Law, EPO Decision, European Union

(V.O.)/

In an appeal from an opposition decision that maintained the patent, an EPO board refused to admit an auxiliary request that had been filed by the proprietor during opposition and formally re-entered with the initial response to the grounds of appeal. Other than implicitly through arguments about the main request, the response failed to take…

Enforcement, Germany, Injunction, NPE, Scope of protection, Validity

(Hoffmann Eitle)/

…well not really, but the German Federal Court of Justice has recently issued a decision (Kreuzgestänge, X ZR 103/13) that may expose Germany’s “Bifurcation System” to even more questions and criticism than in the past. Bifurcation is a term probably originating from geography and generally means “splitting of a main body into two parts”. An…

UPC

(Clifford Chance)/

This month of October will fade away, leaving behind it the “Protocol to the Agreement on a Unified Patent Court on Provisional Application”, done at Brussels on 1 October 2015, the purpose of which – as its name suggests – is to provisionally apply Articles 1-2, 4-5, 6(1), 7, 10-19, 35(1, 3 and 4), 36-41…

Finland

(Attorneys-at-Law TRUST)/

By Jan Lindberg and Kiira Lehtonen About a year ago we had an exceptional case in Finland where Ranbaxy Laboratories Limited, Ranbaxy UK Limited and Ranbaxy Pharma AB (“Ranbaxy”) were awarded millions in damages in a case against Warner-Lambert Company LLC and Pfizer Oy (“Pfizer”), given in June last year (Helsinki District Court, case L…

(Indirect) infringement, Enforcement, Finland, Kluwer Patent Cases, Pharma, TRIPS

(Roschier)/

The Finnish Supreme Court held that the reversal of the burden of proof stipulated in Article 34 TRIPs as implemented in the Finnish Patent Act does not per se require a party to disclose its manufacturing process, but only to prove that it used a different process than that specified in the patent. The threshold…

United States of America

(Wolters Kluwer Legal & Regulatory US)/

Astornet Technologies—the licensee of a method patent for securing “vehicular gate entries” at airports—could not sue three government contractors that allegedly induced or contributed to the direct infringement of the asserted patent by the Transportation Security Administration (TSA), the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit has ruled (Astornet Technologies Inc. v. BAE Systems,…