Rather ironically, Directive 2004/48/EC (the “Enforcement Directive”), which was meant to enhance the protection of intellectual property rights throughout the European Union (“EU”), had just the opposite effect, at least in one aspect. As the readers know well, the Directive requires the applicant of a preliminary injunction to prove that an act of infringement is…
by Dr. Simon Klopschinski Under EPO case law there is the “inescapable trap” of Article 123 (2) and (3) EPC. The German Federal Court of Justice decided in the “Winkelmesseinrichtung” case that the “inescapable trap” does not apply to German national patents. In recent time different nullity boards of the German Federal Patent Court have…
When does prior private use give a party the right to continue using the invention? Any person may claim personal possession on the ground of Article L. 613-7 of the French Intellectual Property Code providing that said person proves possession of the invention prior to the filing date or priority date of the patent. In…
The Federal Court of Justice (FCJ) held that where a defendant in a patent infringement action has been found to be liable for infringement in a decision that is preliminarily enforceable but subject to appeal, it is generally necessary to suspend enforcement of this decision under Secs. 719 (2) and 707 Code of Civil Procedure…
The expected number of local divisions of the future Unified Patent Court (UPC) is so high that one may wonder if there will be any advantage in terms of specialization of judges and economies of scale. Bas Pinckaers, head of the patent department of Van Doorne and co-organizer of the Unitary Patent Package Conference on…
Most readers will know that so-called Swiss form claims (“Use of drug X in the manufacture of a medicament for the treatment of disease Y”) were first proposed by the Enlarged Board of Appeal of the EPO in the EISAI case back in December 1984 to allow new uses for known drugs to be patented….
by Niels Hölder and Thomas Koch In “Zugriffsrechte” (Access Rights) (docket X ZR 35/11), the Federal Court of Justice decided that a claim can in principle not be construed such that it covers none of the embodiments described in the specification. To simplify the facts, the claim in question specified two process steps. The Federal…
The non patent eligibility of a new dosage for the same disease was reiterated by a decision issued by the tribunal de grande instance de Paris, 3rd chamber, 3rd section, handed down on 5 December 2014 in the infringement proceedings between Akzo Nobel NV, MSD OSS BV and MSD France SAS, on the one hand, and Teva Santé…
By Rechtsanwalt Dr. Ingve Björn Stjerna, LL.M., Certified Specialist for Intellectual Property Law, Düsseldorf. This article reflects the personal opinion of the author. On 18 November 2014 Advocate General Yves Bot delivered his Statements of Position (afterwards “Opinions”) in terms of Spain’s nullity actions against the two Regulations on the “unitary patent”, his recommendation to the CJEU…
Many readers, particularly those based on one of the islands to the Northwest of the Canal de La Manche, will remember the famous metaphor used by then Justice Robin Jacob in his Decision of 23 October de 2001 (paroxetine): “The defendants could, so soon as they settled upon the product they were intending to sell,…
