The Supreme Court revoked claims 1 to 4, and found claim 5 to be novel and inventive but not infringed, because the result of defendant’s machine was not obtained by the claimed means. The court sanctioned the appeal court’s decision that the doctrine of equivalence could not be applied. Click here for the full text of…
One of the recurrent topics in patent litigation in Spain is whether or not a Court can review the validity of a patent in the context of preliminary injunction proceedings. According to some Courts, life is too short in preliminary injunction proceedings. If the Court had to embark upon analysing the validity of the patent,…
In a 2-1 decision issued August 3, 2012 in Momenta Pharmaceuticals, Inc. v. Amphastar Pharmaceuticals, Inc., the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit held that the safe harbor provisions of 35 USC § 271(e)(1) can shield the defendants from liability for patent infringement arising out of their use of patented methods to satisfy…
The interesting six-jurisdiction patent case between two of the world’s leading enzyme manufacturers, the Danish companies Danisco A/S (now part of DuPont) and Novozymes A/S has already been subject to earlier blogs both here and several times on EPLAW and PatLit. To recap the story briefly, Novozymes started the proceedings by applying for a preliminary…
The classic English approach for determining whether a claimed invention is obvious is to compare the prior art and the claimed invention, to identify the differences between the two and to ask whether those differences, viewed without knowledge of the claimed invention, were obvious or required any degree of invention*. This is often contrasted with…
The High Court considered the extent to which a claim for damages in a patent infringement case could be extended at the damages inquiry stage. It found that whilst it is just and convenient to extend the inquiry to infringing acts of the same type as that on which the Court in the main action…
Regarding the interpretation of “offering for the purpose” (of making, using etc.) in the sense of Article 53(1)(b) Dutch Patent Act, the Supreme Court held that offering has to be construed broadly and is not restricted to offering for sale. The defendant submitted its generic product for listing in G-Standaard, the database for medicinal products…
The Board decided that the introduction of the Rules of Procedure of the Boards of Appeal (RPBA) overruled prior case law on admission of new arguments not included in the grounds of appeal, as distinguished from new facts and evidence. The Board ruled that introduction of new arguments may violate Article 12(2) RPBA, which requires…
The objection raised by the opponent that the protected subject matter of a divisional application extends beyond the content of the parent application does not represent a “fresh ground for opposition”,. This bbecause in the present case i.c. the opposition division hadhas earlier raised an unrelated objection earlier, holdinstating that the patent based on the…
The board addressed the public availability of publications on the internet, holding that direct and unambiguous access of a document should be possible in order to become state of the art. A mere theoretical possibility of having access is not sufficient, nor is retrievability by a search engine per se. A safe test is that…
