An EPO board held that an appellant in a cross-appeal can be bound by an analogy of the bar against reformatio in peius, when filing a request later than with the grounds of appeal. When the appellant could have filed the request with the grounds of appeal, but filed the request only in response to…
It is remains open whether the Czech Republic and Slovakia will ratify the UPC Agreement anytime soon, according to Martin Husovec, a Slovak-born lawyer & academic and Doctoral Research Fellow at the Max Planck Institute in Munich. He has been following UPC developments in particularly these two EU Member States. Apart from economic reasons, language and…
In February this year, the Ministry of Employment and Economy of Finland set up a Working Group to make preparations for the ratification of the Unified Patent Court Agreement (“UPC Agreement”). The resulting memorandum has now been published, including a draft for a Government Proposal, which covers actions to be taken for its implementation in…
Some Late Summer Thoughts about Molten Polymers and two Decisions by the German Federal Court of Justice Now that the unusual heat of this summer in central Europe finally seems to have ended, it might be a good point in time to activate our cerebral bio-polymers again. So let us muse about the melting of…
One of the tricky consequences of Article 64 of the European Patent Convention (“EPC”), which establishes that the European patent is immediately enforceable after its publication, and Article 99, which provides for “post-grant” oppositions, is that quite often the combination of these two articles fuels two trains that run in parallel where the validity of…
In a recent decision, the Danish appeals court (High Court) overturned the first instance decision not to grant an application for an interlocutory injunction. The case concerned whether or not the manufacture and sale of a number of hearing aids by GN ReSound A/S constituted an infringement of Danish patent No. DK/EP 2 076 065…
by Bernward Zollner In a decision of 20 January 2015 the German Bundesgerichtshof has discussed the validity of the EP 0 964 031 and has confirmed at the end the previous judgement of the Bundespatentgericht by which the patent had been found to be invalid. The reasoning, however, was different: The claim as defended concerned…
The CJEU decided on a referral by the District Court Düsseldorf with regard to the interpretation of Art. 102 TFEU in the context of patent infringement actions regarding standard essential patents (SEPs). The Court held that the owner of an SEP who seeks injunctive relief against an alleged infringer does not abuse a dominant position…
If foreign counterparts of a European patent have been declared invalid in five European jurisdictions and the arguments in these court decisions are substantially convincing, the prima facie invalidity of the Swiss part of the same European patent is sufficiently established for the purposes of preliminary injunction proceedings. A full summary of this case has…
The Oslo District Court invalidated the Norwegian patent NO 324 454 B3 on a method intended for the direct detection of oil and gas in subsea reservoirs using electromagnetic measurements due to lack of novelty over four citations. This judgment differed from the English Court of Appeal, which had found that there were no grounds…
