Equivalents, Germany

(Rospatt Osten Pross)/

About half a year ago I reported on new developments in German case law concerning the doctrine of equivalence (see http://kluwerpatentblog.com/2014/10/10/news-about-the-doctrine-of-equivalence-in-german-case-law/). Just at the beginning of this month my colleague Bernward posted about further developments (see http://kluwerpatentblog.com/2015/03/02/8966/). Now again, there is a recent decision of the German Bundesgerichtshof (Federal Court of Justice) dealing with the…

Bulgaria, Case Law, Kluwer Patent Cases

(Delchev & Partners)/

The Bulgarian Patent Office refused to issue a supplementary protection certificate for a medical product comprising three components as one of them was not within the scope of protection of the basic patent. The decision of the Patent Office was first annulled by the first instance court but subsequently upheld by the Bulgarian Supreme Administrative Court….

Spain

(Clifford Chance)/

On 12 March 2015, the Court of Justice of the European Union (“CJEU”) published the judgment announced in our last blog in Case C-577/13, in response to some of the preliminary questions referred by the High Court of Justice (England and Wales), Chancery Division (Patents Court) in a case between Actavis Group EHF, Actavis UK…

United States of America

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Nine claims of a SynQor patent for a high efficiency power converter were anticipated by the combination of two prior art references that taught DC-to-DC power converters for pulsed loads, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit has ruled (Vicor Corp. v. SynQor, Inc., March 13, 2015, Clevenger, R.). Because the combined references…

United States of America

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The Patent Trial and Appeal Board did not err in affirming a patent examiner’s obviousness rejection of an application that disclosed a system for using two-way communication satellites to regulate the activation of a vehicle’s ignition, based on a driver’s mental state as determined by response times, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal…

European Union, SPC

(Clifford Chance)/

The Supplementary Protection Certificate (“SPC”) seas have been relatively calm after the turmoil caused by “Super Thursday” (i.e. 12 December 2013), when shortly before packing for Christmas the Court of Justice of the European Union (“CJEU”) published three judgments on SPCs in a row. However, over the last few months there have been recent developments,…

Case Law, EPC, EPO Decision, Inventive step, Kluwer Patent Cases

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The Board emphasized that there was a relation between who was to be considered to be the skilled person for judging inventive step on one hand and the choice of the closest prior art on the other hand. A general problem to modify a product from one field so that it could be used in…