Novelty

In our post on 30 October 2012 we referred to forthcoming appeals dealing with how the question of obviousness should be tackled by the English courts. The Court of Appeal has now given its verdict…

A composition obtainable on the market is at least not then novel if the composition can be analyzed and reproduced by a skilled person without undue burden. For this purpose, it is sufficient for a…

The Supreme Court held that claiming priority of an earlier application requires a direct and unambiguous disclosure in the priority document of all features of the technical teaching as defined in…

Now that we are less than one month away from implementation of the First-Inventor-To-File provisions of the America Invents Act (AIA), stakeholders are considering whether to file new patent…

The District Court held a patent entitled "Special Alcoholic Drink" invalid, due to lack of novelty and clarity as a non-enabling disclosure. Furthermore, the Court dismissed the invalidity action…

A recent Decision of the EPO’s Technical Board of Appeal 3.2.05 found claims of a “mother” patent to lack novelty over the disclosure content of an EPO application that was a daughter (divisional) to…

This past week I had an interesting hearing at the EPO where an opposition was based, inter alia, on public prior use. The opposition division heard a number of witnesses on the question whether the…

In countries where patents and utility models (sometimes called "petty patents") co-exist, a recurrent question is which is the level of inventiveness required for utility models as opposed to…

Applying a purposive construction of the claims the Court found no infringement similar to the conclusion in prior parallel proceedings between the parties in the Netherlands, Germany and the United…