Search results for

The district court in summary proceedings recently rejected Taste of Nature's bid to ban infringement of its European Raphanus patent. The court held that there is a significant chance that the patent will be revoked, because it relates to subject matter which is excluded from patentability.

Last January 27, the Industrial Property Law was amended, with the most relevant issues relating to enforcement of IP rights entering in force on January 30.

In a much-awaited decision and probably the first of its kind in India, in the case of Natco v Bayer, the Office of the Controller General of the Indian Patent Office issued a compulsory licence in favour on Natco. Natco now has a non-exclusive and non-assignable licence to Bayer's Indian Patent 215758, for making, using, selling and offering to sell (not importing) the generic version of Nexavar (sorafenib tosylate) within India, for the treatment of kidney and liver cancer. Interestingly, the entire proceeding lasted less than a year and the drug in question was not a life-saving drug.

The Greek Patent Office recently introduced procedures to facilitate the quicker issuance of a search report for national applications, which are intended to establish priority rights for a later EPO or PCT application.

In nullity suits before the German Federal Patent Court, the verdict of the Court has a binding legal effect on the parties involved. Thus, the nullity plaintiff having lost a suit cannot file a further nullity suit against the same patent for the same reasons. The legal effect of the Court's verdict is supposed to finally settle the dispute between the parties involved and an exception to this rule can only be acknowledged under very specific exceptional circumstances.

In France, when an employee of a company makes an invention, ownership depends on his employment contract. Generally, the contract contains a clause stating that the employee has an inventive role and that inventions resulting from his work belong to the company. In return, according to French law, the company must pay additional remuneration to the employee for each of its inventions.

The European Patent Office has released its 2011 statistics, according to which the number of new patent applications filed has reached an all-time high of 244,437. Some 24% of the new applications filed in 2011 originate from the US (28% in 2007), and 32% come from Asia (25% in 2007). EPO member states account for 38% of all filings (40% in 2007). Some 33,181 applications were filed by German applicants, and 12,107 by applicants in France. Switzerland comes in third. The number of UK-based applications has dropped by 9.4% compared to the previous year to a total of 6,464.

A new Patents Order, 2011 has come into force in Brunei Darussalam, effective January 1 2012. This legislation repeals the previous patent legislation: The Inventions Act, Chapter 72.

What kind of work deserves copyright protection? According to the 1994 Belgian law on copyright and related rights, a work should be expressed in a certain form, be communicated to the public (the ideas are not protected) and be original. Since the Screenoprints judgment by the Benelux Court of Justice, the case law has often used a fourth criterion: "the stamp of the personality of the author".

In Austria, patents may be revoked by sending a request for revocation to the nullity department of the Austrian Patent Office. Decisions may be appealed to the Supreme Patent and Trademark Senate, a special court established at the Supreme Court that is exclusively responsible for registered IP rights, such as patents, trade marks and designs. The Austrian system is therefore similar to Germany's bifurcated system, which also provides separate proceedings for validity of patents.