The FCJ held that the right to claim priority, which is in fact the right to file a follow-up application, can be transferred to a third party who was not the applicant of the earlier application. This transfer is governed by the law of the earlier application, in this case German law. Neither German law…
The readers will recall that on 18 July 2013, the European Court of Justice (“ECJ”) handed down its controversial judgment in case C‑414/11 Daiichi Sankyo Co. Ltd, Sanofi-Aventis Deutschland GmbH v. DEMO Anonimos Viomikhaniki kai Emporiki Etairia Farmakon. In this judgment the ECJ, making a 180º twist in relation to the criteria endorsed in Opinion…
In preliminary injunction proceedings: to fulfil the requirement of urgency a patentee must actively and with determination enforce the patent. A patentee does not have to wait for the outcome of nullity proceedings if a generic company has launched an infringing product on the market, thereby causing irreparable harm to patentee. A full summary of…
As a rule, an applicant has a right to inspection of respondent’s premises in order to prepare a claim for damages due to illegal exploitation of secret know-how. The applicant must designate construction plans which are to be inspected, otherwise the request for inspection will not be sufficiently precise and clear under Sec. 253(2) CCP….
Owing to the amendments to the German Patent Act (GPA) passed with the so-called Patent-Act Amendment Act of October 19, 2013 (Federal Gazette 2013, 3830), a number of user-friendly changes have been implemented. The most important ones, including electronic file inspection, early first patent examination during search proceedings and improvements in patent opposition proceedings, as…
The Board of Appeal used its discretionary power to declare inadmissible an appeal based on the claims as granted after the proprietor had only defended amended claims before the opposition division. Even if this should not be construed as abandonment of the claims as granted, the request should not be admitted for reasons of procedural…
The Court of Appeal of Burgos dismissed the appeal against the Judgment of the Provincial Court of Burgos, which upheld a patent for a pharmaceutical composition and its use, despite the fact that clinical trials regarding the patented composition and the patented use were mentioned in the prior art. The full summary of this case…
(1) If a plaintiff can prove there was an “offering” of means for the patented purposes, it can be assumed that the means were also delivered for those purposes, and that therefore the plaintiff has a right to claim damages and the provision of information due to indirect infringement. (2) When a patent is assigned…
The French Supreme Court condemned a patentee’s undue use of an evidentiary measure (infringement seizure, “saisie-contrefaçon”) as a way to obtain information from a competitor, specifically information relating to the manufacturing processes of its direct competitor, beyond the scope of the lawsuit (“fishing expedition”). The full summary of this case has been posted on Kluwer…
The Federal Circuit decision in Novatris AG v. Lee, Nos. 2013-1160, -1179 (Jan. 15, 2014), interpreted 35 USC § 154(b)(1)(B)(i) as it relates to the impact that a Request for Continued Examination (RCE) has on a PTA award for the USPTO’s failure to grant a patent within three years of its filing date (so-called “B delay”…
