Two final decisions of the Patent Trial and Appeal Board—each finding that certain apparatus claims of a wireless communication network owned by DSS Technology Management were invalid as obvious—have been reversed by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit, because the Board failed to provide a sufficient explanation for its findings, and a…
Around this time last year, in Edwards Lifesciences v Boston Scientific [2017], His Honour Judge Hacon (sitting as a High Court Judge) had the opportunity to analyse two interesting aspects of UK patent law: (i) the law of implied disclosures and anticipation; and (ii) the importance of so-called secondary evidence in the evaluation of inventive…
The French National Institute of Industrial Property (INPI) has just dispelled doubts by means of an official statement( https://www.inpi.fr/fr/nationales/communique-relatif-au-calcul-de-la-date-d-expiration-des-certificats-complementaires-de-protection ) it is now possible for holders of a supplementary protection certificate (SPC), issued in France before October 6, 2015, to require extension of their protection duration. The conditions are simple: (1) the SPC shall still be in…
The Patent Trial and Appeal Board correctly determined that all 79 claims of a patent related to a computerized method for identifying and substituting information in an electronic document were invalid for obviousness, the Federal Circuit has held. Although the Board erred in its analysis by declining to apply a prosecution disclaimer limiting the patent’s…
The Constitutional Court of Portugal held that mandatory arbitration can invalidate inter partes a pharmaceutical patent where the issue is raised incidenter tantum. Case date: 24 May 2017 Case number: 297/16 Court: Constitutional Court of Portugal A full summary of this case has been published on Kluwer IP Law
This case concerns the issue of the urgency required in order to justify a preliminary injunction for patent infringement. The CoA Düsseldorf had to deal with the question of whether the Petitioner may wait for the outcome of a pending invalidation action before filing a motion for a preliminary injunction. The CoA Düsseldorf confirmed that…
A Spanish patents court rules for the first time on the sometimes blurry line dividing “discoveries” and “inventions”. The Court found that a method for prenatal diagnosis based on the discovery that sufficient fetal DNA can also be detected in maternal serum or plasma is a non-patentable discovery, because it lacks any “additional technical teaching”…
As published in previous blogs, on 1 April 2017 a new Patents Act came into force in Spain which has modernized Spanish patent law. For example, the new Law got rid of “non-examined” patents. As a result, since 1 April 2017 all patents are examined, which has aligned the examination procedure with the standards of…
Substantial evidence supported the Patent Trial and Appeal Board’s finding that an inter partes review petitioner failed to show that a patent owned by Thales Visionix—claiming a method for tracking motion relative to a moving platform—was not obvious over a prior art patent combined with two additional references, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the…
In a recent judgment rendered by the Danish Maritime and Commercial Court between Coloplast A/S (Coloplast) and Hollister Incorporated (Hollister), the Court considered whether or not Coloplast was the co-inventor (and co-owner) of a patent application filed by Hollister. In 2011, Hollister filed its European patent application EP 11175010.5 regarding a catheter package and the…
