As the readers are well aware, quite often patented products are not necessarily marketed (or only marketed) by the patent owner. It is usual for patent owners to market their products through their subsidiaries and/or through third party co-marketers, which join forces with the former to obtain the best possible distribution of the patented product….
As previously reported on this blog, the new Unified Patent Court (UPC) will bring the biggest change in the patent litigation landscape Europe has ever seen. It will soon be possible to obtain a single court decision effective across the whole of a market worth around €10 trillion. The UPC will have jurisdiction over not…
Ensuring the independence and integrity of its judges is crucial for every court system. After its first year of existence, the Swiss Federal Patent Court has slightly amended its Guidelines on Independence for the part-time judges of the Federal Patent Court. However, those guidelines have proven to be very useful in practice. It is interesting…
On 15 January 2013, the French Cour de cassation, in the litigation between the Novartis companies and the Actavis companies about valsartan, drew the consequences of the 9 February 2012 order rendered by the CJEU in the frame of a parallel litigation in the United Kingdom. As already explained in a previous post, the company governed by the laws…
The Helsinki Court of Appeal granted Lundbeck preliminary relief against Sandoz. The Court held in the light of Article 34 TRIPS that in preliminary relief cases the standard of proof of infringement may not be too high if the patent in suit is a process patent for the manufacture of a new product, and therefore…
The Helsinki Court of Appeal found that ratiopharm had infringed Merck’s supplementary protection certificate covering losartan. The Court applied the reversed burden of proof of the Patents Act, which has its basis on Article 34 of the TRIPS Agreement. It further considered that, in the absence of proof to the contrary, the active ingredient losartan…
In one of my earlier posts I gave the news that, after years of uncertainty as to the admissibility of interlocutory (pre trial) declaratory judgements of non infringement in IP cases (here), the amendments introduced to the Italian IP Code in 2010 made it clear that such proceedings are admissible as now explicitly contemplated by…
The Federal Court of Justice held that the meaning of a patent claim as a whole and the contribution of the single features to the result of the invention must be assessed in nullity proceedings. It is not permitted to attribute a certain meaning to the claim to only avoid an issue of undue broadening….
The Court held that the marketing of coffee capsules suitable for a Nespresso machine does not infringe the patent on an extraction system for the coffee capsules. Instead, the user of the machine is also permitted to use capsules which are not marketed by the patent holder. This is at least the case if the…
The uninterrupted transit of goods designated with a trademark that is protected in Germany does not constitute an infringement of the trademark right according to German law. Should the trademark be protected in the country of destination, a foreign IP right will not be protected, owing to the principle of territory of property rights, as…
