‘Europe can become a more attractive forum for patent enforcement than the US’, according to Wouter Pors, partner of Bird & Bird. Kluwer IP Law interviewed him about the new draft proposal for the Rules on the European Patent Litigation Certificate and other appropriate qualifications. ‘We shouldn’t just focus on the minimum requirements.’ Pors expects the…

On 3 June 2015, the High Court of Justice (“Tribunal Superior de Justicia”) of Madrid handed down a judgment which has alerted everyone of the need to have robust systems in place to make sure that a deadline for paying renewal fees is not missed. The facts of the case may be briefly summarised as…

A district court’s decision denying awards of attorney fees incurred by several mobile device and digital camera makers in successfully defending against patent infringement claims by Honeywell International Inc. has been vacated and remanded by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit. The district court was directed to reconsider whether the case was…

In its decision Digitalblock (digital block) the Higher Regional Court of Düsseldorf (Oberlandesgericht Düsseldorf) has discussed the question whether “sleeping” features of a device can cause patent infringement (judgement of 19 February 2015, docket No. I-15 U 39/14). The case was about set-top boxes for receiving free-to-air and encrypted television signals. The patent concerned a…

The District Court of The Hague invalidated two patents for a lack of inventive step. The patents claimed to solve two separate problems of a known production method for glatiramer acetate. The court held that one problem would be solved as a bonus effect of applying common general knowledge. Solving a problem resulting from non-application…

In this case the FCJ discussed the criterion of “equivalence” for a non-literal infringement of a patent. The Court held that one has to assess all technical effects which have to be achieved with the patented features to solve the underlying technical problem. The entire combination of these effects forms the patented solution. For the…

The enlarged board of appeal of the European patent office allowed a petition for review of a board decision because the right to be heard had been denied. The decisive ground for the decision under review involved a new conclusion from a document that was in the proceedings. This conclusion could not be directly derived…

An EPO board held that an appellant in a cross-appeal can be bound by an analogy of the bar against reformatio in peius, when filing a request later than with the grounds of appeal. When the appellant could have filed the request with the grounds of appeal, but filed the request only in response to…

It is remains open whether the Czech Republic and Slovakia will ratify the UPC Agreement anytime soon, according to Martin Husovec, a Slovak-born lawyer & academic and Doctoral Research Fellow at the Max Planck Institute in Munich. He has been following UPC developments in particularly these two EU Member States. Apart from economic reasons, language and…