In this case the Court of Appeal of Lyon affirmed the first French judgement granting an interlocutory injunction to prevent imminent infringement of a patent. The President of the First Instance Court had not considered any argument relating to the validity of the patent, and decided that in summary proceedings, only the existence of the…
The German Federal Court of Justice has maintained Microsoft’s patent relating to alternative handling of short and long filenames. In the first instance, the Federal Patent Court considered the teaching of the patent not inventive over the Rock Ridge Interchange Protocol used for CD-ROMs. However, supported by a court expert the Federal Court of Justice…
I. Priority of Invention II. Proving Conception and Reduction to Practice III. Sample Laboratory Notebook IV. Instructions For Maintaining Laboratory Notebook V. Instructions for Maintaining Inventory of Laboratory Notebooks I. PRIORITY OF INVENTION In accordance the United States patent statute, only the “first inventor” of the claimed invention is entitled to a patent for that…
By decision no. 9291 of 19 April 2010, the Italian Supreme Court clarified that the sale of a single unit of the patented product is novelty destroying under Art. 46 of the Italian IP Code, which provides that an invention is new if it is not comprised in the state of art and that this…
The English Patents County Court is to appoint a new judge on the retirement of His Honour Judge Fysh QC in July of this year. The Patents County Court was originally established in 1990 under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. It was designed to offer an alternative forum from the High Court (including…
In its 3 March 2010 decision, the Cour d’Appel of Paris, Division 5, Chamber 1, reversing the decision of the Tribunal de Grande Instance of Paris on this question, held that the authorisation to carry out a saisie-contrefaçon may be requested and obtained even after expiry of the patent, since the saisie-contrefaçon is intended to collect evidence of infringing acts committed prior to the patent expiry. This decision relating to the French saisie-contrefaçon will certainly be of interest to practitioners of other Member States of the European Union since Article 7 of EC Directive 2004/48, which had to be implemented into national laws before 29 April 2006, requires the Member States of the European Union to introduce into their national law “measures for preserving evidence” using as models the French saisie-contrefaçon and the Anton Piller order. This decision which finds no contradiction in Article 7 of EC Directive 2004/48 and which is essentially based on the evidential nature of the saisie-contrefaçon , may therefore be extended to the “measures for preserving evidence” set up into the laws of the different Member States of the European Union.
In a court order of 11 May 2010, the President of the Court of First Instance of Brussels refused a plaintiff to have indirect access to confidential information in the possession of a court-appointed expert through foreign patent infringement proceedings. The court appointed expert had obtained this confidential information while executing a counterfeit seizure, authorized by the…
The District Court Duesseldorf held that the addressee may not refuse acceptance of a complaint according to Art. 8 para. 1 lit. a) of Regulation (EC) No. 1393/2007 on the Service in the Member States of Judicial and Extrajudicial Documents in Civil or Commercial Matters if the court file contains objective evidence that the document…
The possibility of enforcing, in Spain, the non-translated claims of a European patent is one of the issues dealt with by the Barcelona Court of Appeal in its recent Ruling dated 15 April 2010. In that particular court case, a European patent holder applied for interim injunctions on the basis of a revised translation of…
Sufficiency of disclosure is one of the requirements for the grant of a European patent (Art. 83 EPC). The disclosure in a patent specification shall enable the skilled person to apply the invention, i.e. to make the claimed product or apply the claimed process. A claimed product or process is often defined in general terms…
