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In our blog of 31 October 2013 (“Groucho Marx, fairness and the opting-out fee“) we explained that Groucho Marx once sent a telegram to the Friar’s Club of Beverly Hills with the following text: “Please accept my resignation. I don’t want to belong to any club that will accept people like me as a member.”…
Infringement claims against cell phone carrier T-Mobile and its vendors, Nokia and Ericsson, concerning four patents for cell phone infrastructure equipment were properly barred by the doctrine of patent exhaustion, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit has held. The lower court’s order granting the defendants’ motion for summary judgment was therefore affirmed…
The Dutch part of EP 119 – allegedly essential to the UMTS standard – was found to be obvious over the latest draft of the UMTS standard pre-priority date read in conjunction with a document of a UMTS Working Group proposing changes thereto. The skilled person would read these together and so be confronted with…
The longstanding social unrest at the European Patent Office (EPO) seems to be heading for a climax. After years of tensions and conflicts with the trade unions, Boards of Appeal and others, EPO president Benoît Battistelli, criticized for his ‘tyrannical’ leadership, has now lost the crucial support of Jesper Kongsted, chairman of the EPO’s Administrative…
There will be no fee to opt out of the jurisdiction of the future Unified Patent Court (UPC). It had already been rumored for some time, but it has now been confirmed with the publication of the ‘Rules on UPC Court Fees and Recoverable Costs’. The document was agreed on in a meeting of the…
The most sensible option for the UK is to postpone the ratification of the UPC Agreement until the ‘Brexit’ referendum of 23 June 2016 has been held, according to Luke McDonagh, Lecturer in IP Law at City University London. Mc Donagh told Kluwer IP Law there is nervousness in the ‘very pro-EU IP Community in…
by Bernward Zollner In a recent judgment announced on 27 October 2015 the German Bundesgerichtshof has issued a judgment which concerns joint nullity actions (X ZR 11/13 – Fugenband). Two nullity-plaintiffs had filed nullity actions at the German Bundespatentgericht seeking to nullify a patent. The German Bundespatentgericht had completely dis-missed both nullity actions. Against this…
The Federal Ministry of Justice of Germany has presented a first draft bill on the ratification of the Unified Patent Court (UPC) Agreement. It is accompanied by a draft bill to implement the Unitary Patent (UP) system at the national level. A spokesman of the German Ministry of Justice explained to Kluwer IP Law that…
A recent decision by the German Federal Court of Justice (Polyesterabmischungen, X ZR 90/11) relating to a patent concerning polyester resin blends may be instructive to demonstrate how an experimental report reproducing a prior art test instruction can be helpful to a nullity plaintiff, even if the description in the prior art document is incomplete…
A non-disclosure agreement in an employment contract between a medical device maker and a former employee was not an unenforceable non-compete agreement under Texas law, theU.S. Court of Appeals in Cincinnati has decided in a not-for-publication opinion. The district court erroneously concluded that the non-disclosure provision formed a “lifetime non-compete clause” in violation of Texas…
