The Federal Constitutional Court of Germany (BVerfG) intends to decide on the complaint against German ratification of the Unified Patent Court Agreement this year. The case (2 BvR 739/17) is on the 2019 decision list, which was published yesterday. It doesn’t come as a surprise. The UPCA case was on the 2018 list as well,…
A district court erred in granting summary judgment to the defending provider on the grounds that the asserted claims were invalid for lack of written description and were not infringed by the provider’s system. Case date: 14 February 2019 Case number: No. 17-2510 Court: United States Court of Appeals, Federal Circuit A full summary of this…
The introduction of an SPC manufacturing waiver in the European Union is now all but a done deal. Following the European Commission’s initial proposal for a regulation amending Regulation (EC) 469/2009 on SPCs for medicinal products (COM(2018) 317 final) issued on 28 May 2018, the European Parliament’s Committee on Legal Affairs (JURI) adopted its final…
If a patent only provides the skilled person with a general scientific explanation as to why the procedure disclosed therein is suitable for the purpose in question and does not disclose a new technical teaching in relation to this purpose, but merely a discovery of biological correlations, then this is insufficient to acknowledge novelty (continuation…
The Supreme People’s Court of China recently issued a new judicial interpretation regarding preliminary injunctions (PI) for intellectual property (IP) disputes that took effect on January 1, 2019, officially titled “Provisions of The Supreme People’s Court on Several Issues Concerning the Application of Laws in Adjudication of Action Preservation Cases Involving IP Disputes” (Provisions). The…
On 16 January 2019, the District Court of The Hague ruled that the Dutch part of Eli Lilly and Company’s patent EP 1 313 508 is valid. The judgment was handed down in an invalidation action brought by Sandoz International GmbH. EP 508 relates to the use of pemetrexed in combination therapy with vitamin B12…
There seems to be a growing consensus that the manner in which conditions for granting patent remedies are defined affects the scope of patent protection. It is also true in case of injunctions. When they are granted automatically to the patentees in case of infringement, their position is significantly strengthened. Rafał Sikorski of the Faculty…
Two recent decisions in the UK and Australia in the long-running pregabalin litigations demonstrate the different approaches in these jurisdictions to determine if a patent specification has sufficiently disclosed an invention. Readers will recall that the judgments concerned Warner-Lambert’s Swiss-style claims for the use of the compound pregabalin (marketed as Lyrica) in the treatment of…
A court in the Netherlands has ruled that two Dutch patents for processing teff, a kind of grain which has been used for thousands of years to make injera, the fermented pancake that Ethiopians eat with their meals, are null and void. The Ethiopian government has welcomed the verdict. The patents had led to outrage…
Visser’s Annotated Patent Convention, the 2018 Edition, previously known as the Annotated European Patent Convention, was published on 15 December 2018. The new 2018 edition of this preeminent work – the only regularly updated authoritative article-by-article commentary in English on the European Patent Convention (EPC), its implementing regulations, and associated case law – provides the complete text of the…
