“EU leaders could agree to divide responsibilities for providing main judicial oversight of a new unitary patent system between courts in the UK, France and Germany.”
OUT-LAW.com, 28th June 2012
Source: www.out-law.com
“It was a requirement of Parliament and Council Directive 2008/95/EC on trade marks that the goods and services for which the protection of the trade mark was sought should be identified by the applicant with sufficient clarity and precision to enable the competent authorities and economic operators, on that basis alone, to determine the extent of the protection conferred by the trade mark.”
WLR Daily, 19th June 2012
Source: www.iclr.co.uk
“The circumstances in which the Intellectual Property Office (IPO) can initiate proceedings to revoke a patent on the strength of a non-binding opinion it was asked to submit on the patentability of an invention should be expanded, it has said.”
OUT-LAW.com, 14th June 2012
Source: www.out-law.com
“A pharmaceutical company has won its battle for compensation despite the fact that it was seeking to sell medicine in the UK that was manufactured in breach of Canadian patent law.”
OUT-LAW.com, 10th May 2012
Source: www.out-law.com
Les Laboratoires Servier and another v Apotex Inc and others [2012] EWCA Civ 593; [2012] WLR (D) 138
“The court was able to take into account a wide range of considerations in order to ensure that the ex turpi causa defence only applied where it was a just and proportionate response to the illegality in question. Although a party claiming compensation on a cross-undertaking in damages for lost sales of products the manufacture of which infringed a foreign patent was relying on an unlawful act sufficiently causative of its claim to engage the defence in principle, the defence did not apply where the party had believed reasonably and in good faith that the patent was invalid, and the illegality was recognised by making a deduction in the assessment of damages for the amount which the foreign court would have awarded in patent infringement proceedings.”
WLR Daily, 3rd May 2012
Source: www.iclr.co.uk
DKH Retail Ltd v Republic (Retail) Ltd [2012] EWHC 877 (Ch); [2012] WLR (D) 109
“The current practice, in which applications to transfer cases to and from the Patents County Court were handled by judges of the court from which the case was to be transferred, was correct and in accordance with the Civil Procedure Rules.”
WLR Daily, 3rd April 2012
Soure: www.iclr.co.uk
Innovia Films Ltd v Frito-Lay North America Inc [2012] EWHC 790 (Pat); [2012] WLR (D) 107
“Where a court had jurisdiction under section 82(4)(b) of the Patents Act 1977 to determine a question to which section 82 applied, the court’s jurisdiction was exclusive of all other possible jurisdictions.”
WLR Daily, 30th March 2012
Source: www.iclr.co.uk
Gedeon Richter plc v Bayer Schering Pharma AG [2012] EWCA Civ 235; [2012] WLR (D) 66
“On an application for the revocation of a registered patent on the ground of obviousness it was sufficient for the judge hearing the case to take an objective view whether a skilled formulator would take the trouble to obtain copies of papers published by inventors or review their contents to ascertain whether the patent in question related to an invention which was novel. The judge was not obliged to consider what view a notional team that included a medicinal chemist, pharmacologists and biochemists would take as to the issue of obviousness or whether something would have been ‘obvious to try’.”
WLR Daily, 7th March 2012
Source: www.iclr.co.uk
“A computerised method of processing images and categorising features within it into database-searchable words is not excluded from patentability, a hearing officer at the Intellectual Property Office (IPO) has ruled.”
OUT-LAW.com, 5th January 2011
Source: www.out-law.com
“The Government is likely to change patent laws because some pharmaceutical companies are at risk of breaking patent law when carrying out clinical testing, the Intellectual Property Office (IPO) has said.”
OUT-LAW.com, 5th December 2011
Source: www.out-law.com
“Chartered Institute of Patent Attorneys urges David Cameron to bid for court to be based in UK rather than Germany.”
The Guardian, 28th November 2011
Source: www.guardian.co.uk
Schütz (UK) Ltd v Werit UK Ltd and another (No 3) [2011] EWCA Civ 1337; [2011] WLR (D) 338
“The ‘transaction’ which an exclusive licensee of a patent was required by section 68 of the Patents Act 1977 to have registered within six months if the court was to award him costs in proceedings for infringement of that patent was the first transaction that had made him an exclusive licensee.”
WLR Daily, 22nd November 2011
Source: www.iclr.co.uk
“The practice in the Patents Court whereby a patentee could discontinue his claim for infringement and consent to the revocation of his patent on terms that he paid the costs of the action up to the date of service of the original defence, with the alleged infringer paying the costs of the action thereafter to the date of discontinuance, was no longer to be followed. It was to be replaced by the general rule in CPR r 38.6 that, unless the court otherwise ordered, a claimant who discontinued was liable to pay the defendant’s costs.”
WLR Daily, 8th November 2011
Source: www.iclr.co.uk
Eli Lilly & Co v Human Genome Sciences Inc [2011] UKSC 51; [2011] WLR (D) 312
“Since the Technical Board of Appeal of the European Patent Office had adopted a consistent approach to patents for biological material, the English courts should follow the principles of law set out in its decisions. Accordingly, in deciding whether a patent disclosing a new protein and its encoding gene was susceptible to industrial application the question was whether, taking the common general knowledge into account, it had been plausibly shown that it was usable.”
WLR Daily, 2nd November 2011
Source: www.iclr.co.uk
Brüstle v Greenpeace eV (Case C-34/10); [2011] WLR (D) 305
“Any human ovum after fertilisation, any non-fertilised human ovum into which the cell nucleus from a mature human cell had been transplanted, and any non-fertilised human ovum whose division and further development had been stimulated by parthenogenesis constituted a ‘human embryo’ within the meaning of article 6(2)(c) of Parliament and Council Directive 98/44/EC of 6 July 1998 on the legal protection of biotechnological inventions (OJ 1998 L 213, p 13) and could not therefore be patented.”
WLR Daily, 18th October 2011
Source: www.iclr.co.uk
Nokia Oyj (Nokia Corpn) v IPCom GmbH & Co KG: [2011] EWHC 2719 (Pat); [2011] WLR (D) 303
“Section 63(2) of the Patents Act 1977 was not intended to act as a sanction against careless drafting or lack of good faith when those matters had no bearing on the damages or other remedy sought by the patentee.”
WLR Daily, 26th October 2011
Source: www.iclr.co.uk
“Cutting-edge research into new medical treatments in Britain was thrown into disarray on Tuesday as the highest European court ruled that stem cells from human embryos cannot be patented.”
Daily Telegraph, 18th October 2011
Source: www.telegraph.co.uk
“The UK’s Intellectual Property Office has changed its guidance on how its reviewers will consider the ‘mental act’ exemption to patentability when assessing patent applications for computer-implemented inventions.”
OUT-LAW.com, 18th October 2011
Source: www.out-law.com
“Computer simulations of designs are not ‘unpatentable’ mental acts, the High Court has ruled.”
OUT-LAW.com, 11th October 2011
Source: www.out-law.com
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