The Proposed EU Patent before the European Parliament – A Report and Not (Yet) a Vote
As could almost have been predicted, the European Parliament has cancelled its First Reading and its vote on the creation of unitary patent protection. It has instead now scheduled just a brief hearing for 14 February 2012, to be held between 9:00 and 10:20 a.m. Members of the European Parliament will present their reports in this hearing on the proposal for a Regulation on unitary patent protection (Rapporteur: Bernhard Rapkay), on the proposed Regulation on translation arrangements (Rapporteur: Raffaele Baldassarre) and on the court system for patent litigation (Rapporteur: Klaus-Heiner Lehne).
Negotiators of the European Council and the European Parliament claim to have substantially agre [...]
FCJ rules that the skilled person will look for approaches already provided by a standard when wanting to improve that standard
The German Federal Court of Justice recently issued a decision entitled ‘E-Mail via SMS’, November 22, 2011, X ZR 58/10, in which it was found that when seeking to improve a data structure prescribed in an international standard, a skilled person would consider mechanisms already described in the standard when solving the identified technical problem. It was furthermore found that if the standard provides a manageable number of possible solutions, each having specific advantages and disadvantages, this provides an incentive to take each of the solutions into account.
In the case in question it was ruled that it was obvious to apply a known concept for sending instructions to a SIM card of a [...]
“Polierendpunktbestimmung” – A Christmas Present to the IP Profession by the German Federal Court of Justice
Just a few years ago, the German IP profession suddenly became very, very nervous. The Regional Court of Düsseldorf had issued its first of a handful of decisions wherein the German part of a European Patent was declared ineffective ex tunc for lack of a proper translation of the patent specification into German. This was the Tamsulosin case published in GRUR Int. 2007, 429. In this case, one description page (from the section titled “Background of the Invention”) was inadvertently missing from the German translation filed with the Patent Office. This missing page in the translation – probably the result of a copying or postage error, or even a loss of the page only within the Patent Office [...]
Is there still such thing like infringement under the doctrine of equivalence in Germany? – Recent trends
On 13th September 2011, the German Federal Court of Justice (FCJ) rendered a decision under the keyword “Diglycidverbindung”, i.e. diglycidyl compound (case number X ZR 69/10).
The case revolved around a license agreement. Defendant alleged that he was using a variant of the patented process which no longer fell within the scope of the license. The lower instance courts held otherwise, i.e. confirmed that Defendant’s variant is covered by the patent in suit. The FCJ reversed this judgement and remanded for further consideration.
Claim 1 of the patent in suit (DE 36 17 672) is concerned inter alia with a method for the manufacture of a reagent wherein a solid phase is reacted in a firs [...]
What the European IP World Can Learn from the Euro Crisis
The creation of a Unified Patent Litigation System seems to have a lot of political momentum these days, with one proposal following the other at fairly short intervals. This blog discusses the latest Council Presidency proposal of a draft agreement on a Unified Patent Court and draft Statute of 26 October 2011. While a lot of desirable progress has been made, the current draft agreement is still far from being ready for signature and requires both thorough consideration and amendment in several quite important aspects, not least as regards finances.
Notwithstanding obvious differences in nature, certain parallels between the Eurosystem and the planned Unified Patent Litigation System (UPLS) [...]
Fining Abroad is Fine – CJEU Approves Enforcement in another EU State of a Disciplinary Court Fine Due to Violation of an Injunction
When a party successfully asserted a claim for injunctive relief at court on the grounds of IP-right infringement, but the foreign defendant has no assets in Germany, the problem arises as to how the compliance with such an enfoSrceable injunction can be guaranteed. According to German law, upon violation of an enforceable injunction the successful plaintiff can request the court to fix a penalty (disciplinary fine) against the defendant.
So far, however, it has been deemed to be impossible to enforce German court decisions on disciplinary fines in other EU Member States since such decisions have a punitive character and were, therefore, thought not to represent civil or commercial matters [...]
