The Supreme Court held that Article 68 (3) IP Code relating to prior use, sets forth both a “quantitative” and a “qualitative” limit, in the sense that it “serves to identify the business behavior which determines the limit of the monopoly granted to the patent holder in respect of the prior user”. Since the prior…
Regarding the gathering of evidence in French and foreign territories, the Paris Court of Appeal affirmed the appealed decision and acceded to defendant’s reasoning in ruling that (i) the ‘saisie-contrefaçon’ carried out on French territory on the basis of two patents was not deprived of its valid basis by the revocation of one of said…
The French Supreme Court for the first time recognized, as a general principle of French patent law, the estoppel “according to which a person may not contradict themselves to the detriment of another person” in the course of infringement proceedings. Click here for the full text of this case. A summary of this case will…
On Friday, July 20, 2012, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit heard oral arguments in Association for Molecular Pathology v. Myriad Genetics, Inc. (the ACLU “gene patenting”/BRCAI case), which is on remand in view of the U.S. Supreme Court decision in Mayo v. Prometheus. Reading the tea leaves from the judges’ questions and…
Jurisdiction of Article 6 (1) BR against Co-Defendants [each infringing all national parts of EP] affirmed;
Jurisdiction according to Art. 31 BR affirmed for cross-border provisional injunctions despite nullity pleas
In a decision of 9 February 2012, the Court of Appeal of Milan decided a case concerning the ownership of the rights over an invention allegedly made in the framework of a work-made-for-hire relationship. The case is interesting as Italian law does not explicitly regulate the case of inventions made for hire. Articles 64 and…
As has been widely reported in the IP and wider press, a major breakthrough was made at a political level on 29 June 2012 on the long-running EU Unitary Patent and Unified Patents Court dossier. Importantly, the agreement reached included a significant amendment to the previous proposals, whereby provisions would be deleted from the draft…
One of the points of contention in cases where inventive step is discussed is which expert is better suited to express an opinion on whether or not the invention would have been obvious for the person skilled in the art. English Courts, for example, have a long-standing tradition of carefully scrutinising the experts presented by…
In 2007 in Nichia v Argos* the UK’s most senior full-time patents judge at the time, Jacob LJ, held that disclosure should no longer be available as a matter of course on standard issues such as obviousness in patent cases. This came as a breath of fresh air to many IP practitioners in the UK…
Practitioners and applicants have been wondering how the USPTO would respond to the July 20, 2012, U.S. Supreme Court decision in Mayo Collaborative Services v. Prometheus Laboratories, Inc., which held that Prometheus’ personalized medicine method claims could not be patented because they were directed to a law of nature, and so excluded from patent-eligibility under 35 USC…
