Patents

On the 20th of October, 2020 the Central Government through an Official Gazette notification published the Patents (Amendment) Rules, 2020, containing the revised rules. In summary, amendments have been made to the timeline and content required while submitting the Statement of Working of Patents (Form 27) for a granted Patent ... Read More

Cochlear Corp. v. Alfred E. Mann Foundation (Supreme Court 2020) It is always tricky for a defendant to appeal solely on damages.  Here, Mann filed this patent case back in 2007 and finally got to trial in 2014.  The jury answered as follows: Infringement: Yes Willfulness: Yes Invalid: No The ... Read More

Political decision-making processes tend to be so complex that it's often very difficult to identify a clear causation between what went wrong and why. In connection with Germany's patent reform, which has been carefully crafted by the country's government to change almost nothing at all (see my initial reaction to ... Read More

In re Nitro Fluids LLC (Fed. Cir. 2020) 2018 — Cameron sued Nitro in S.D. Tex (Houston) where both companies are located.  That case is still pending. 2020 — Cameron separately sued Nitro in W.D. Tex (Waco).  The new action accuses the same Nitro products but asserts different (albeit related) ... Read More

See, I told you so. NOT. I have a high hit rate (including with respect to both the FTC v. Qualcomm district court decision and the appellate opinion), but I must admit I wasn't on the money in the en banc context. Given the high profile of the FTC v. ... Read More

St. Jude Medical failed to show that challenged claims of patent owned by Snyders had been anticipated by other patents, nor did it prove that a particular combination demonstrated obviousness. Claims of a patent directed to an artificial heart valve manufactured by Snyders Heart Valve LLC and a system for ... Read More

With respect to its App Store terms and policies, Apple is now arguably the most prominent antitrust defendant in the tech universe. Simultaneously, Apple is pressing antitrust charges--through private litigation--particularly in connection with abusive patent-leveraging practices. While the issues are very distinct, having the shoe on one foot today and ... Read More

If you noticed the allusion to a band name in the headline, you might have grown up in the 80s, in which case you may also remember the famous line "I pity the fool." Otherwise you might know the proverb "curiosity killed the cat". Whatever, those opposing German patent injunction ... Read More

One step up and two steps back.Early last month I cheered a "spectacular turnaround" in the German patent reform process as the Federal Ministry of Justice and Consumer Protection had made substantial changes to its proposal for a new patent injunction statute as compared to its first draft, which was ... Read More

TecSec, Inc. v. Adobe Inc.  (Fed. Cir. 2020) The simple setup in this case: 2011: Following claim construction, TecSec stipulated that use of Adobe’s product does not infringe the asserted patents. 2013: Claim construction is reversed on appeal, and the infringement case started-up again. The question on appeal: During the ... Read More

Image from here We’re pleased to bring to you a guest post by Avani Bagaria, analysing the benefits and pitfalls of using prizes as an alternative to patents for incentivsing innovation. Avani is a 5th year student at Jindal Global Law School, Sonipat. Critiquing Prizes ... Read More

One year ago, the Landgericht München I (Munich I Regional Court) celebrated the tenth anniversary of its Patent Local Rules ("Münchner Verfahren"). On that occasion, the court announced an "evaluation" study by the Max Planck Institute in order to find out how practitioners view the court's performance. Last week, the ... Read More

2020-1026-Coalition Ltr re PTAB.FINAL The following letter to Congress appears to have substantial support from patent owners. The basics of the letter is to say that Dir. Iancu’s changes to the IPR process have been positive and should stick.  Part of the issue here is that Dir. Iancu is a ... Read More

On Friday, the Landgericht München I (Munich I Regional Court) entered a final (though appealable) judgment in a Conversant v. Daimler standard-essential patent (SEP) infringement case in which Conversant was asserting a former Nokia patent (or, to be precise, a derivative of a former Nokia patent). I've meanwhile obtained a ... Read More

As Bob Hudec explained in his legendary The GATT Legal System and World Trade Diplomacy, GATT’s (since 1995, WTO) long-standing practice of seeking to adopt decisions by consensus finds its roots in 1947, when the then 23 parties to GATT were a small club of good friends. The proposition that ... Read More

For quite some time, the German patent judiciary has had a reputation of being plaintiff-friendly, but this year the system has simply gone off the deep end in terms of highly problematic decisions, all the way up to the Federal Court of Justice, which hit a new low with its ... Read More

In this week’s Patent News – Patents (Amendment) Rules, 2020 come into force; Nokia seeks injunction against Lenovo for patent infringement; LDC’s request WTO to extend transition period under the TRIP’s for 12 years; CNIPA and EPO to launch pilot program for Chinese Applicants to designate EPO as an additional ... Read More

Joining the majority of European courts, the Paris Court of Justice ruled that Eli Lilly’s patent, which relates to the combined administration of pemetrexed disodium and vitamin B12, was infringed by the marketing of Fresenius’ pemetrexed diacid. It also awarded a record amount of damages of €28,000,000: a first in ... Read More

The United States Patent and Trademark Office USPTO, via its Federal Register Notice dated August 3, 2020, published a final rule on adjustment on fee changes from October 2, 2020. This final rule incorporates fee changes with certain adjustments made in reply to the feedback received from the Patent Public ... Read More

This week’s Patent & Design data has been compiled from the Official Journal of the Patents and Designs published by the patent office on the 23rd of October 2020. These statistics are presented to you by the Patent attorneys and experts of BananaIP Counsels, India’s leading Intellectual Property Firm. INDIAN ... Read More

Recent Headlines in the IP World: Denis Boucher: Theratechnologies Confirms Issuance of U.S. Patent Covering the Use of Tesamorelin in the Treatment of Individuals Suffering From NAFLD/NASH (Source: Globe Newswire) Claudia Grimaldi: IGC Receives New Patent from U.S. Patent Office to Treat Cachexia and Eating Disorders in Humans and Veterinary Animals (Source: ... Read More

We’re pleased to inform you that DPIIT IPR Chair at Maharashtra National Law University (MNLU), Nagpur is organising a three day free virtual workshop for students on ‘Nuances of Patent Processing’ from October 26-28, 2020. For further details, please read the announcement below. Three-day Virtual Workshop on ‘Nuances of Patent ... Read More

Before I talk about Epic Games' latest filing in the antitrust dispute with Apple in the Northern District of California, here's a follow-up to what I posted one month ago when I wrote that the political clout of the newly-founded Coalition for App Fairness (Epic Games, Spotify, the Tinder company, ... Read More

Today the 21st Civil Chamber of the Landgericht München I (Munich I Regional Court) granted Conversant Wireless, a notorious standard-essential patent (SEP) troll, a Germany-wide injunction against Daimler over EP2934050 on an "apparatus and method for providing a connection" (a divisional of a patent Nokia once gave to Conversant).While Daimler ... Read More

In Germany the re-ratification process of the Unified Patent Court Agreement – which is necessary after the Federal Constitutional Court (FCC) partially upheld a complaint last March and declared the first ratification procedure invalid – is progressing rapidly. The decisive reading in the Bundestag, which will make clear whether the ... Read More

We’re pleased to bring our readers an in-depth post looking at the grant of a patent application related to the anti-cancer drug Nivolumab, written by Dr. Venkata Subramanian Raman and Ms Sai Ratna Manjari. Dr. Venkata Subramanian Raman is a registered patent agent and proprietor of Patentszone, and Ms. Sai ... Read More

For a long time, Qualcomm had kept a surprisingly low profile in the automotive patent wars. But it was always active behind the scenes. The San Diego-based chipmaker is a member of some of the same lobbying groups as Nokia and Ericsson. And more recently, Qualcomm has been lobbying the ... Read More

Guest post by Associate Professor Yang Yu of Shanghai University of International Business and Economics and Professor Jorge L. Contreras. As one of us has recently observed (here and here), courts in the U.S. and UK adjudicating cases involving standards-essential patents and FRAND licensing commitments[1] have increasingly issued injunctions preventing ... Read More

The following is simply the text of the Supreme Court’s 1895 decision: Consol. Electric Light Co v. McKeesport Light Co, 159 U.S. 465 (1895) [16_S.Ct._75] Consol. Electric Light Co v. McKeesport Light Co, 159 U.S. 465 (1895)  This was a bill in equity, filed by the Consolidated Electric Light Company ... Read More