Just a few years ago, the German IP profession suddenly became very, very nervous. The Regional Court of Düsseldorf had issued its first of a handful of decisions wherein the German part of a European Patent was declared ineffective ex tunc for lack of a proper translation of the patent specification into German. This was…
The German company Hewlett-Packard GmbH (hereinafter referred to as Hewlett-Packard) was granted on 31 March 1993 the European patent EP 0 309 596, entitled “pumping apparatus for delivering liquid at high pressure”. Under an assignment contract dated 29 October 1999, registered in the French Patent Register on 21 August 2000, the German company Agilent Technologies Deutschland GmbH (hereinafter referred to as Agilent) became the…
Over the last few years, Spanish Courts have struggled to resolve an avalanche of cases where the core of the discussion was the legal effects of TRIPS on the effects of the Reservation made by Spain when it joined the European Patent Convention in 1986. According to this Reservation, patents filed before 7 October 1992…
We revisit this case, not this time regarding the question of what constitutes the ‘making’ of an invention as resolved by the Court of Appeal in March 2011, but with regards to the question of costs in relation to Schütz as an exclusive licensee. The general position under English law is if an exclusive licence…
Preliminary injunctions in patent disputes can be a very effective weapon to fight against free riders on the one hand but are equally hurtful for defendants being at-tacked unjustifiably on the other hand. Such preliminary injunctions, especially when granted on an ex parte basis, can simply hinder the defendant to conduct business on the market….
In a recent decision by the Danish Maritime and Commercial Court (reported in the Danish Legal Gazette as U2011.2745S), the court ruled on the issue of restitution subsequent to default in making timely payment of a renewal fee. A US company, acting thorugh local patent counsel, failed to pay its 5 year renewal fee on…
This long awaited ECJ decision concerns the interpretation of the term “embryo” in the Biotech Directive (98/44/EC). According to the Court Art. 6 (2c) of the Directive excludes the patentability of use of human embryos for commercial or industrial purposes, and only use for therapeutic or diagnostic purposes which is applied to the embryo for…
The Court of Appeal dismissed Krka’s appeal against a decision of the Oslo Court of Enforcement and Execution, which granted AstraZeneca a preliminary injunction preventing Krka from marketing its generic esomeprazole product in Norway. The Court of Appeal held that the esomeprazole salt in Krka’s generic product with an optical purity of 98,8-99,4% was “an…
Can a valid European patent be declared invalid in Poland? In other words, can a computer-implemented invention for which a European patent has already been granted be refused a patent by the Polish Patent Office? While this may sound contradictory, it is in fact common practice – not only in the Polish Patent Office but…
The requisite of “imminence” introduced by Directive 2004/48/EC, coupled with the measures approved by the Ministry of Health to speed-up the administrative steps necessary to launch generics, has placed owners of patents that protect chemical and/or pharmaceutical products at a crossroads: if they file an application for a preliminary injunction before the generic medicament has…
