There are three compulsory rules you must observe when challenging a judge on grounds of bias: 1) Be prepared. 2) Use good reasons. 3) Have a worthy goal. I wish to exemplify this by a hearing I had just recently: As some of you may know, the current presiding judge of the appeal board for…
In Grimme Landmaschinenfabrik GmbH v Scott [2010] EWCA Civ 1110 the English Court of Appeal stated clearly its support for judicial collaboration facilitating de facto harmonisation of patent law in Europe. The Court then interpreted the UK provisions on indirect/contributory infringement consistently with approaches taken in The Netherlands and Germany. The case in question concerned…
One of the strategies used by manufacturers of generic drugs to try to capture the market of the “reference product” when the patent protecting the latter expires is to present the generic as a cheap alternative to the “reference product”. This raises several interesting questions, such as whether or not a generics company, for the…
The question at issue was whether a verbal preparatory agreement between the parties on a patented invention had given rise to a valid license agreement and ensuing entitlement to damages. The Supreme Court affirmed an earlier Court of Appeals decision, for the most part, by finding that a (patent) license agreement must be in written…
The court held that the plaintiff who is listed as proprietor of the patent in the patent register is allowed to claim both injunctive relief and damages as well as claims to rendering accounts and provision of information to prepare the damage claim for all infringing acts committed during the time of his/her enlistment, despite…
The Appellant had obtained both utility model and patent protection for a mechanical invention. The Defendant argued that the subject matter of both rights did not fulfil the novelty requirement, because it had been disclosed to the public by demonstrations of the invention to both individual persons and corporate entities prior to the priority date….
Atanas filed a patent application for a ‘Gravity Power System’. The Bulgarian Patent Office (BPO) dismissed the application because the claimed invention was not industrially applicable and therefore not patentable as the system’s principle of functioning was contrary to the law of energy conservation, i.e. the system would always need an external force in order…
The Italian Antitrust Authority (Autorità Garante della concorrenza e del mercato) announced on 26 October that it commenced proceedings against Pfizer following a complaint filed by Ratiopharm alleging that Pfizer’s behaviour in the enforcement of its patent rights amounts to abuse of a dominant position. It is too soon to make comments on this case….
In its 25 June 2010 decision, the Tribunal de Grande Instance of Paris ruled on the calculation of patent infringement’s damages. The significance of this decision lies in the fact that it explains step by step the reasoning used to calculate the amount of damages awarded to the patentee victim of an infringement.
In Denmark, as is probably the case in many other jurisdictions, in IP proceedings a case must be brought against each alleged infringer in that alleged infringer’s local jurisdiction (bailiff’s department of the local city court). In a recent decision from the Danish High Court (Eastern Division) (case reported in the Danish Legal Gazette UfR…
