Inventive step

On 1 February 2019, the Danish Maritime and Commercial Court granted an injunction against Mylan AB's sale of the product Tadalafil »Mylan« containing 5 mg tadalafil in Denmark. On 7 September 2018,…

In nullity proceedings initiated by Accord Healthcare (“Accord”) the District Court of The Hague has held Shire-NPS Pharmaceuticals’ (“NPS”) patent EP 1 203 761, the basic patent for an SPC covering…

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…

The EPO’s Problem-Solution-Approach is, on the face of it, simple and widely applied also in the national jurisprudence of the EPC member states. It starts with the determination of a “closest prior…

Relevant prior art may prove not to be useful as a starting point for an attack on inventive step if the prior art teaching is negated by later studies before the effective date of the patent claims…

The Court of Appeal upheld the first instance decision that the patent in suit lacked novelty and inventive step over the prior art. The Court confirmed, following Halliburton v Smith, that despite…

The provision of a crystal form of a polymorphic substance, which the skilled person inevitably obtains if he uses a process suggested by the state of the art for the production of the substance,…

The court solved the question of inventive step using the problem-solution approach, defining the objective technical problem without including a pointer to the solution of the problem. This, however…

The number of inventive step attacks in opposition procedures at the European Patent Office may be constrained in the future due to a recent change in the EPO Guidelines. According to David Brophy,…