The court found that the annexes to the expert’s report, filed in the framework of descriptive seizure proceedings, contained confidential information which was not relevant to assess the alleged infringement. It therefore ordered the expert to remove the annexes from the report and enjoined Novartis from using the information contained therein, subject to a civil…
The Court of Appeal has overturned the High Court’s finding of non-infringement, holding Napp’s divisional patents, relating to controlled release formulations of a painkiller called oxycodone, to be valid and infringed by Ratiopharm’s and Sandoz’s ‘Cimex’ product. The Court of Appeal’s finding of infringement contrasts with decisions in Germany where the German designation of the…
A patent infringement action may not be rejected on the grounds that a feature of the asserted patent claim seems to be unclear in its technical meaning. A lack of clarity may only give reason to limit the feature to the narrowest reasonable meaning. The full summary of this case has been published on Kluwer IP Law.
In this decision the Danish Supreme Court for the first time uses equivalents as a legal base for violation of a patent. Equivalents have long been a part of Danish patent law, but the Supreme Court has been cautious and reserved concerning their use. The respondent in this case had a Danish patent, concerning a…
The Provincial Court of Barcelona dismissed an appeal filed against a judgment from the Commercial Court number 4 of Barcelona, which had concluded that the product claims of the patent in suit were valid and enforceable in Spain under Articles 27.1 and 70.7 of TRIPS. The main interest of the judgment lies in the fact…
The Federal Court of Justice held that a licensee’s failure to exploit an exclusive patent license can justify termination of the license agreement by the licensor, even if there is no breach of contract or default by the licensee. From an objective licensor’s perspective, however, there must be no prospect of an improvement in the…
The Federal Patent Court has decided that an inventive step according to Article 56 EPC is not established if the person skilled in the art has only to conduct routine exploratory analysis based on the prior art. Against this legal background the Federal Patent Court nullified the patent in suit arguing that in a situation…
When the transitional provisions for EPC 2000 are silent, the Board has to establish which legal text is applicable. In that case the Board has to take into account that it is undesirable to use both different versions of the EPC over a prolonged period of time and that there is no indication that the…
The Dutch Supreme Court stated that the patentee still has an interest in this supreme appeal proceeding after amendment of the patent pursuant to Articles 105a-c EPC 2000 subsequent to coming into force of EPC 2000 and the Appeals Court’s decision to nullify the patent. Although the Appeals Court in subsequent proceedings should take the…
The patent in suit contains claims for the (+)enantiomer of citalopram and a method for its resolution from the racemate (the diol method). The Defendants appealed a decision of the Court of Appeal arguing that the patent was insufficient because it effectively claimed the (+)enantiomer made by any method whereas the specification only disclosed two…
