The claims of the patent in suit related to a memory for sensing sub-groups of memory cells that required the activation of word line segments and corresponding sets of sense amplifiers in combination. The patentee argued that from one of the objectives of the invention mentioned in the original application, the skilled person could derive…
The Court of Appeals Karlsruhe has decided that under specific circumstances the enforcement by a non-manufacturing licensing company of an injunction based on a standard-essential patent may be provisionally suspended against security payment by the defendant until the decision of the appeal. Although as a general rule of German procedural law the interest of a…
In the search report of the patent application several prior art references were mentioned that were not described in the patent application as originally filed, while they were known to the applicant. The Examining Division had decided that Rule 42(1) EPC 2000 would not allow a later introduction of the discussion of the prior art…
The Board of Appeal had to decide on a main request for a divisional application that corresponded to an auxiliary request for the parent application on which the Board had already finally decided. The Board of Appeal found the appeal for the divisional application inadmissible because subject-matter on which a final decision has been taken…
The Federal Court of Justice (Bundesgerichtshof) ruled that a defendant in a patent infringement suit may successfully raise an antitrust defense against the issue of an injunction where the asserted patent is standard-essential and the defendant has tried to obtain a license to the patent under reasonable conditions. The full summary of this case has been published…
For an invention to be considered obvious it is usually necessary that there are additional incentives that go beyond the identification of the technical problem and lead the person skilled in the art to search the solution for this technical problem on the path of the invention. A full summary of this case has been…
Claim 1 of the patent application contained the feature that ‘the device is adapted to generate L addresses, which are smaller in number than N = Ng × 2m2 virtual addresses for reading data from said interleaver memory in which L data bits are stored’. The Board of Appeal noted that it might be true…
The invention related to text mining using mathematical techniques such that information can be presented in a way that can be more easily understood or evaluated by a user. The Board of Appeal noted that it is a fundamental question whether such an invention is within a field of technology. It can hardly be regarded…
The Federal Court of Justice ruled that the subject matter of a patent does not extend beyond the content of the application as filed when terms are used in the claims that are not literally used in the application text but are summarizing words for longer descriptions in the application as filed. A full summary…
The District Court of The Hague held that all claims of Lundbeck’s escalitopram patent were invalid for lack of inventive step. The District Court nullified the patent and also called the Dutch Supplementary Protection Certificate which was based upon the patent null. The District Court’s decision contains many references to the 4 May 2007 decision…
