As could almost have been predicted, the European Parliament has cancelled its First Reading and its vote on the creation of unitary patent protection. It has instead now scheduled just a brief hearing for 14 February 2012, to be held between 9:00 and 10:20 a.m. Members of the European Parliament will present their reports in…
by Stephan Lieck The Düsseldorf Regional Court had to decide whether it is misleading under competition law that the former proprietor of a patent advertises with the fact that there is patent protection for a product (wrongful representation of an article as patent-ed/arrogation of patent), although the patent had expired at the time of arrogation…
Gemcitabine is part of the family of nucleosides which are compounds constituted of two chemical parts: a sugar bound to a nucleobase through a glycosidic bond. As any nucleoside can have two isomers (the alpha-anomer and the beta-anomer) depending on the orientation in space of the glycosidic bond, it must be clarified that Gemcitabine is…
On September 16, 2011, President Obama signed the Leahy-Smith America Invents Act into law, making the most sweeping changes to U.S. patent law since at least the 1950’s. Many of the provisions can be broadly classified into those that serve the goal of international harmonization (first-inventor-to-file), those that target patent quality concerns (pre-issuance submissions, inter…
There seems to be ample consensus in that Justice is better administered by specialised Judges than by non-specialised Judges. With this view in mind, in 1993 the Barcelona Court of Appeal took a groundbreaking step forward by conferring exclusive competence to one section (Section 15) to hear appeals filed in intellectual property cases. The successful…
Although a number of issues were raised as to the validity of two patents in the recent Omnipharm v Merial[2001] EWHC 3393 (Pat) case, the most interesting feature of the case was the judge’s approach to the question of inventive step. The case focussed in particular on the role of the doctrine of “obvious to…
The German Federal Court of Justice recently issued a decision entitled ‘E-Mail via SMS’, November 22, 2011, X ZR 58/10, in which it was found that when seeking to improve a data structure prescribed in an international standard, a skilled person would consider mechanisms already described in the standard when solving the identified technical problem….
rospatt osten pross Motorola obtained a first instance judgement against Apple, because iPhone and iPad infringe the European patent No. 1 010 336 declared essential to the GPRS standard by ETSI (European Telecommunications Standards Institute). Apple’s defence of a compulsory licence under anti-trust law failed. The German Federal Court of Justice recognised in principle that…
The Board of Appeal had to decide whether the showing of results of a database analysis as a tree diagram could contribute to the technical character of the invention. The Board of Appeal pointed out that in this case one should take a wider view of the term “presentation of information” than just the actual…
An SPC can only be granted if the product falls within the scope of protection of the basic patent. If the basic patent claims a combination of two known components (i.e. a monoclonal antibody with a neoplastic agent), that combination is the patent’s contribution to the art. An individual component is not equivalent to the…
