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…

 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,…

The Dutch company Philips is among the top-10 Patent Cooperation Treaty (PCT) applicants and the top-3 European Patent Convention (EPC) applicants. Owning about 64,000 patents and filing approximately 1,500 patent applications each year (with a strong focus on the growth areas of health and well-being), much is at stake for the company with the introduction…

A decision from Mr Justice Birss in Adaptive Spectrum And Signal Alignment Inc v British Telecommunications Plc [2014] EWHC 4194 has introduced additional complications for parties found to infringe a patent who then seek to work around the same. In essence that party cannot simply sit back and assume that the only feature to address…

As posted here the Swiss Federal Patent Court had to amend its Guidelines on Independence after the Swiss Federal Supreme Court had lifted a decision of the Federal Patent Court concerning the recusal of one of its non-permanent judges on 27 August 2013 in a case concerning the Nespresso coffee capsules. The revised Guidelines on…

Thanks to Miquel Montaña’s brilliant Christmas post, we have learnt a lot about the lucina sine (aut cum) concubitu and the legal impact her involvement may have had for the application of Directive 98/44/EC to the event leading to the holidays that we have just been celebrating. While I must admit that even after having…