A claim defining a compound as having a certain purity would lack novelty over a prior art disclosure describing the same compound only if the prior art disclosed the claimed purity at least implicitly, for example by way of a method for preparing said compound, the method inevitably resulting in the claimed purity. Such a…

As per Article 154 of the Turkish IP Law any person who has a legal interest can file an action to have the Court determine that his acts do not constitute an infringement of the intellectual property rights of a rights owner. For a quite long time patent owners were squeezed between conflicting approaches in…

The injunction gap is a frequently discussed characteristic of those European jurisdictions, Hungary being one such country, whose  patent litigation systems are bifurcated. In a preliminary injunction proceeding in Hungary the court does not assess the validity of the patent in suit, at least not simply at the level of arguments, although decisions on invalidity…

The Bundesgerichtshof (German Federal Court of Justice, BGH) clarified the scope and limits of a prior use right of a manufacturer and supplier of components of a patented device (BGH, judgment of 14 May 2019, X ZR 95/18 – Schutzverkleidung). Under German patent law, a patent has no effect with respect to a party who…

A request for re-establishment should be filed within two months of the date of removal of non-compliance. This date may be the date on which the applicant became aware of the missed due date, even if the professional representative did receive the EPO communications mentioning the failure to comply with the deadline. Case date: 18 June…

Moderated by the Chair of AIPPI’s Biotech Committee, Dr Juergen Meier, this pharma panel session aimed to compare and contrast the protection available to proprietors of antibody patents across a number of important jurisdictions: the US, Canada, Europe, China and Japan. Echoing a point made by Sir Robin Jacob in his address at the Opening…

One of the features that render the European Union’s Supplementary Protection Certificate (SPC) unique in comparison to similar legal instruments in other jurisdictions, including the United States and Japan, is that there is no legal provision expressly calling for any specific relationship or agreement between the patent proprietor (and SPC applicant) on the one hand,…

The Czech Republic will not ratify the Unified Patent Agreement in the near future, even if the Unitary Patent system takes the hurdles of the Brexit and the German constitutional complaint. According to a Price Waterhouse Coopers (PwC) report on the impact of the patent package, which was commissioned by the national IP office, the…

On 29 August 2019, the Danish High Court (Eastern Division) rendered a decisive new decision regarding legal costs in Danish patent (and IP) litigation, markedly changing the previously conservative tendency in awarding costs in Danish patent cases: In one among several parallel cases regarding an SPC (Tenofovir), the Maritime and Commercial High Court in April…