The Federal Court of Justice held that the meaning of a patent claim as a whole and the contribution of the single features to the result of the invention must be assessed in nullity proceedings. It is not permitted to attribute a certain meaning to the claim to only avoid an issue of undue broadening. The Court specifically held that the claim interpretation may only be derived from the patent as granted. A comparison with the original application may only be made for other purposes, such as the assessment of an undue broadening, or the clarification of contradictions between the claim wording and the specification if the claim has been limited in opposition proceedings.
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The Court held that the marketing of coffee capsules suitable for a Nespresso machine does not infringe the patent on an extraction system for the coffee capsules. Instead, the user of the machine is also permitted to use capsules which are not marketed by the patent holder. This is at least the case if the coffee capsules are not the “functional core” of the invention. In this case the consumer can expect to be allowed to use also third party coffee capsules.
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[...]The Federal Court of Justice held that data can be a product directly obtained by a patented process and can therefore be protected. An important issue was whether patent rights were exhausted, if the patentee consented to market a video masterband and the infringer used this masterband to produce DVDs The court discussed whether there may have been a danger of infringement if the infringer did not know about the exhaustion of rights.
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[...]This long awaited ECJ decision concerns the interpretation of the term “embryo” in the Biotech Directive (98/44/EC). According to the Court Art. 6 (2c) of the Directive excludes the patentability of use of human embryos for commercial or industrial purposes, and only use for therapeutic or diagnostic purposes which is applied to the embryo for its benefit is patentable. The court leaves it to the national courts to determine in the light of the current technical developments whether and under which conditions stem cells obtained from a human embryo at the blastocyst stage qualify as an embryo in the sense of the Directive. Furthermore, the court held that Art. 6 (2c) of the Directive exclude [...]
This decision deals with the scope of the obligation of a plaintiff to concentrate actions in one case if these are directed against the same defendant regarding the same infringing device, but based on different patents and to what extent the plaintiff may choose to use a patent at a later stage. A later action is inadmissible by law if it concerns the same act of the defendant. The Federal Supreme Court gives further guidelines for interpretation of this statutory provision which is of great practical importance when considering the enforcement strategy.
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[...]In case of actual or potential discrepancies between claim language and the patent description which might allow a broader interpretation the Supreme Court confirms that the claim may not be interpreted to cover all options of the broader description if certain elements of the description have not been reflected in the claim language. Furthermore, such disclosure cannot be brought within the scope of the claims by way of equivalence.
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