The Federal Ministry of Justice of Germany has presented a first draft bill on the ratification of the Unified Patent Court (UPC) Agreement. It is accompanied by a draft bill to implement the Unitary Patent (UP) system at the national level. A spokesman of the German Ministry of Justice explained to Kluwer IP Law that…
A technology driven company whether large, medium or small and at every stage of its life cycle or development will need to consider the question of whether to patent or not to patent. Often a business chooses to refrain from filing a patent application at a particular point in time and instead relies on the…
A recent decision by the German Federal Court of Justice (Polyesterabmischungen, X ZR 90/11) relating to a patent concerning polyester resin blends may be instructive to demonstrate how an experimental report reproducing a prior art test instruction can be helpful to a nullity plaintiff, even if the description in the prior art document is incomplete…
A non-disclosure agreement in an employment contract between a medical device maker and a former employee was not an unenforceable non-compete agreement under Texas law, theU.S. Court of Appeals in Cincinnati has decided in a not-for-publication opinion. The district court erroneously concluded that the non-disclosure provision formed a “lifetime non-compete clause” in violation of Texas…
The Court of Appeal denied Actavis’ claim for declarations of non-infringement in respect of several national designations of Eli Lilly’s European Patent. Whilst agreeing with the High Court that the national designations in suit were not directly infringed, it, nevertheless, overturned the prior decision on the basis of there being indirect (contributory) infringement. The Court…
In a decision to refund an additional search fee, an EPO board rejected a determination of non-unity based on a priori technical differences, which determined different problems solved by different dependent claims without determining patentability with respect to the available prior art found for the independent claim. Instead, lack of unity should be decided based…
Obtaining an authorization to introduce generic medicaments into the market before the expiration of a patent as well as transferring the authorization to third parties does not infringe patent rights in substances used in those medicaments. Nevertheless, the exploitation of such medicaments can only take place upon the expiration of the patent or the respective…
Medical device manufacturer TriReme Medical, LLC had standing to pursue a claim to correct the inventorship of three patents owned by competitor AngioScore, Inc., based on an assignment from a physician who allegedly contributed to the development of the angioplasty balloon catheter claimed in the patents, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit…
Alexander Ramsey is the chairman of the Preparatory Committee of the Unified Patent Court (UPC). He has set the ambitious goal to finish his work by June 2016 with a view to the UPC opening early 2017. Court fees, recruitment and training of judges and fine-tuning of the IT-system are just a few of the…
Case reported and summarized by Gregory Bacon, Bristows LLP Mr Justice Carr is only a few months into his judicial career, but having already provided welcome guidance on the role of plausibility in considering both the questions of inventive step and sufficiency (see earlier blog post on Actavis v Eli Lilly), he has now produced…
