On 21 May 2013, the Court of Appeal issued its rejection of Lilly’s appeal in relation to Actavis’ purported service of an application for a Declaration of Non Infringement (DNI) in respect of not only the UK designation of Lilly’s European Patent relating to a particular salt form of pemetrexed (“the Patent”), but also the…
by Stephan von Petersdorff-Campen The amount at issue in a legal claim serves as the basis for establishing the court fees and lawyers’ fees to be reimbursed to the successful party. The consequences (including indictable consequences) of a claim value that has been set too low have previously been the object of contributions to this…
The FCJ decided in the recently published decision “Wundverband” [Wound Dressing] “Moelnlycke Health Care v. BSN Medical” (docket X ZR 70/12) on 19 February 2013 that if patentee has granted an exclusive license after he has filed an infringement action, an exclusive licensee will be (in part) a legal successor of the patentee. As a…
When a preliminary injunction is lifted, the debate arises regarding the amount of damages that the company affected by the preliminary injunction may claim against the applicant. A recent judgment of 6 May 2013 from Commercial Court number 6 of Barcelona has shed some light on this topic. The background of the case can be…
In an earlier post, I reported the news that a new piece of legislation (the so called “Balduzzi Decree”, Law No. 189/12 of 8 November 2012 confirming Law Decree 158/12 of 13 September 2012 – a consolidated version of the Decree is available here) introduced a rule which some have already labelled as “reimbursement price…
In a divided en banc decision, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit affirmed the district court’s holding that the claims at issue in CLS Bank v. Alice Corporation are invalid under the “abstract idea” exception to 35 USC § 101. While a majority of the judges agreed that the method and computer-readable medium claims are invalid, they disagreed as to why. Further, the court was evenly split as to whether the systems claims are invalid. (With no majority agreement on that issue, the district court decision is affirmed). Even if this case makes its way to the U.S. Supreme Court, patent-eligibility will remain a murky area of U.S. patent law for the foreseeable future.
One of the remedies introduced by Directive EC 2004/48, of 29 April 2004, was preliminary injunctions aimed at prohibiting acts of infringement when there are indicia indicating that an act of infringement may be “imminent.” It is the nature of preliminary injunctions, which require an element of urgency, that patentees may be required to prove…
The PI judge in the District Court of The Hague held that under certain circumstances, provisional cross-border jurisdiction can be derived from art. 31 Regulation (EC) 44/2001, which would require a “real connecting link” between the sought measures and the jurisdiction of a contracting state (ECJ C-391/95, Van Uden/Decoline). However, in the present case there…
The PI judge in the District Court of The Hague held that the processes used to manufacture the generic products in dispute did not fall within the invoked patents’ scope of protection, and particularly that these did not comprise equivalent measures, because the allegedly equivalent substances had significantly different chemical compositions and functionality. Finding the…
The Court of Appeal held that the duty to compensate the successful party’s legal costs in intellectual property proceedings, pursuant to Art. 14 of the Enforcement directive, also applies to invalidity claims, counterclaims and defenses by the alleged infringing party threatened with patent enforcement. To deny such compensation in respect of nullity claims or defenses…
