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.
A summary of this case will be posted on http://www.Kluweriplaw.com
[...]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 its “Leflunomid” decision of 24 July 2012 (Case X ZR 126/09), the FCJ declared a patent claim to be invalid which covered a combination of leflunomide and teriflunomide, on the grounds that it had long been known in the prior art (for 100 years) that some leflunomide spontaneously and unavoidably converts teriflunomide over time (by a ring opening process). The combination was therefore obvious to the expert. The decision will be published in the Kluwer IP case databank.
The plaintiff in the case at issue was a generic company which had launched what it thought was a patent-free mono-product containing just leflunomide. However, due to the conversion of some leflunomide into terifl [...]
In a recent decision (case no. 4A_443/2012) the Swiss Federal Supreme Court had to deal with a dispute between the German Robert Bosch GmbH, which filed suit against the Swiss Federal Confederation based on the Swiss portion of EP 0 741 373. The decision exclusively focuses on the question whether the Swiss Federal Patent Court has jurisdiction to decide Robert Bosch’s injunction and damages claims. The Swiss Federal Supreme Court confirmed that the new Swiss Federal Patent Court is exclusively competent to decide Robert Bosch’s permanent injunction against the Swiss Federal Confederation. However, the Federal Supreme Court stated that the Federal Patent Court is not competent to decid [...]
Introduction
The Court of Justice of the European Union last year delivered a decision on the impact of the GAT/LuK decision on jurisdiction in preliminary infringement proceedings (Solvay/Honeywell).
As the case below is continuing its way through the Dutch courts, the frequency of publications trying to make sense of the 2012 CJEU decision come down significantly. The majority of the commentators so far seem to conclude that the CJEU in Solvay gave the green light to cross-border jurisdiction in preliminary infringement proceedings.
This is a fresh attempt at establishing the impact of the Solvay decision on the interpretation of the relevant articles of the Brussels Regulation (EU Regulat [...]
On 15 January 2013, the French Cour de cassation, in the litigation between the Novartis companies and the Actavis companies about valsartan, drew the consequences of the 9 February 2012 order rendered by the CJEU in the frame of a parallel litigation in the United Kingdom.
As already explained in a previous post, the company governed by the laws of Switzerland, Novartis AG, was granted European patent EP 0 443 983 relating to “acyl compounds”, including valsartan, and, after its expiry, a supplementary protection certificate (SPC) No. 97C0050 which was in turn the subject of a pediatric extension expiring on 13 November 2011.
The company governed by the laws of France, Novartis Pharm [...]
