The PI judge in the District Court of The Hague held that under certain circumstances, provisional cross-border jurisdiction can be derived from art. 31 Regulation (EC) 44/2001, which would require a “real connecting link” between the sought measures and the jurisdiction of a contracting state (ECJ C-391/95, Van Uden/Decoline). However, in the present case there are insufficient connecting points for such cross border preliminary injunction, since it’s initiated exclusively against parties without residence in the Netherlands.

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The PI judge in the District Court of The Hague held that the processes used to manufacture the generic products in dispute did not fall within the invoked patents’ scope of protection, and particularly that these did not comprise equivalent measures, because the allegedly equivalent substances had significantly different chemical compositions and functionality. Finding the alleged infringing processes to be equivalent would be contrary to legal certainty.

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In its decision of 22 April*, the UK High Court (Mr Justice Arnold) has dismissed Nestec’s** claims that Dualit has infringed EP (UK) 2 103 236 (“the patent”) by supplying its own branded “NX Café Caps” coffee capsules which are compatible with Nestec’s Nespresso coffee machines, thus paving the way for new entrants into the Nespresso coffee capsule market. The patent was also found invalid for, amongst other grounds, lacking novelty over prior uses of Nespresso machines in field tests and at a convention.

The decision is noteworthy because it considers in detail the law of indirect infringement and for the first time in the UK the correct approach to the requirement of “a mea [...]

The German Federal Court of Justice (Bundesgerichtshof, BGH) addressed some interesting questions on patents protecting methods relating to data in the decision “MPEG-2-Videosignalcodierung” (“MPEG-2 video signal encoding”), judgement of 21 August 2012, X ZR 33/10. This all was round up by explanations on patent exhaustion in the context of test purchases.

In simple terms, the patent in suit covered a method for encoding video data according to the MPEG-2 standard that is used for DVDs. The case was about production of DVDs by the defendant as requested by a test purchaser of the plaintiff. For this purpose the test purchaser provided a master tape with the video data already in its encoded [...]

In our post on 30 October 2012 we referred to forthcoming appeals dealing with how the question of obviousness should be tackled by the English courts. The Court of Appeal has now given its verdict in several judgments. The latest decision in Regeneron v Genentech dealt not only with the question of obviousness but also questions of novelty and sufficiency, construction and infringement. The Court of Appeal has upheld the decision of Mr Justice Floyd at first instance* in the English Patents Court that Genentech’s patent was valid and infringed.

A brief summary of the facts: Regeneron and Bayer applied to revoke Genentech’s EP (UK) 1 238 986 (the “986 patent”) which discloses and cla [...]

The Court of Appeal of Liège confirmed the President of the Commercial Court’s finding that the appellant had committed patent infringement, and ordered the reimbursement of costs of the saisie-contrefaçon (seizure of evidence), which were not considered damages but as procedural costs.

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A summary of this case will be posted on http://www.Kluweriplaw.com