Validity

With the Judges mostly on summer vacation, August and September have given some time for reflection on several decisions from the Patents Courts in July. One of those decisions was another defeat for…

Some Late Summer Thoughts about Molten Polymers and two Decisions by the German Federal Court of Justice Now that the unusual heat of this summer in central Europe finally seems to have ended, it…

by Bernward Zollner In a decision of 20 January 2015 the German Bundesgerichtshof has discussed the validity of the EP 0 964 031 and has confirmed at the end the previous judgement of the…

The end of July always brings a flurry of decisions from English Patents Courts at all levels as the Judges, understandably, seek to clear their desks before the summer vacation. This year was no…

The Oberlandesgericht Düsseldorf (Higher Regional Court, appeal instance) just issued a court order on the admissibility of new prior art that the defendant discovered only in the second instance…

One area where the practice of the EPO and the German Federal Court of Justice (FCJ) could not be further apart was the assessment of added matter. While the FCJ traditionally had been very lenient…

The Oslo District Court held that the expired Norwegian patent 306452 ("452 Patent") was invalid due to lack of inventive step, which implied that its supplementary protection certificate SPC014 was…

Please click here to find US patent cases from the the U.S. Supreme Court, the US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit, and the U.S. Circuit Courts of Appeals with a detailed summary of each case…

by Niels Hölder and Thomas Koch In “Zugriffsrechte” (Access Rights) (docket X ZR 35/11), the Federal Court of Justice decided that a claim can in principle not be construed such that it covers none…