NIPC Law

Jane Lambert Patents Court  (Mr Justice Meade)  Optis Cellular Technology LLC and others v Apple Retail UK Ltd and others     [2021] EWHC 1739 (Pat) (25 June 2021) This was the second of a series of trials between the claimant patent portfolio owners and the defendant implementors in FRAND litigation.  The trial had been intended to decide the validity and essentiality of  European patent (UK) number 2 229 744 B1  and whether it had been infringed.  One of the defences was proprietary estoppel or, alternatively, acquiescence.  Essentiality was conceded just before trial leaving validity and proprietary estoppel or acquiescence as the only issues.  The case came on for trial before Mr Justice Meade in April 2021,   He delivered judgment on 25 June 2021. At  para [563]  of his judgment, he  held that the patent was valid and that the proprietary estoppel/acquiescence defence failed. The Invention The abstract summa...

Author Rklawton   Licence   CC BY-SA 4.0   Source Wikimedia Commons   Jane Lambert Yesterday the Intellectual Property Office added a new para  125.17.8  on the Formstein defence  to its Manual of Patent Practice .  Considering that the defence is a doctrine of German law and that there has been no firm decision on whether that doctrine applies to this country, that is quite remarkable. Para 125.17.8 describes the doctrine as: "a principle developed under German patent law in relation to infringement and the doctrine of equivalents (DoE), whereby if an alleged infringer can show that an equivalent is a non-inventive variant of the claimed invention, then the patent’s scope for the purposes of determining any infringement is held to its normal construction – in other words the DoE does not apply." I have referred to the doctrine in  Patents - Technetix BV and others v Teleste Ltd . on 19 Feb 2010 and  Patents - Facebook Ireland Ltd v Vox...

Jane Lambert Patents Court (Lord Justice Birss) Facebook Ireland Ltd v Voxer IP LLC [2021] EWHC 657 (Pat) (19 March 2021) In    Eli Lilly v Actavis UK Ltd and others     [2017] Bus LR 1731, [2017] UKSC 48, [2017] RPC 21, the Supreme Court changed the way the courts decide whether a patent claim has been infringed. I discussed that judgment in detail in    The Supreme Court's Judgment in Eli Lilly v Actavis UK Ltd and Others: how to understand it and why it is important   13 July 2017. Up to that judgment a patent could be infringed only if a variant fell within the language of a claim. Lord Neuberger referred to that as a "normal construction". After that judgment a patent could be infringed if the variant operated in a manner that was equivalent to the claim.  This was referred to in that case and subsequently as the "doctrine of equivalents". The issue before Lord Justice Birss in  Facebook Ireland Ltd v Voxer IP LLC [2021] EWHC 657 was ...

Jane Lambert Patents Court (Mr Justice Arnold):  Generics (UK) Ltd (t/a Mylan) and another v Yeda Research And Development Company Ltd [2017] EWHC 2629 (Pat) (26 Oct 2017) On Wednesday, 28 Feb 2018 I gave a talk to the C5 Pharma and Patent Litigation Conference   at the Radisson Blu Hotel in Amsterdam. Mine was one of three talks on the topic Infringement under the Doctrine of Equivalents.  I discussed the law of England in the light of the Supreme Court's decision in Eli Lilly v Actavis UK Ltd and others  [2017] UKSC 48, [2017] Bus LR 1731 while  Paul Reeskamp  and Philipp Cepl , who practise in the Netherlands and Germany, considered the topic in the light of the developing case law in their jurisdictions. I had previously written about the Supreme Court's judgment in  The Supreme Court's Judgment in Eli Lilly v Actavis UK Ltd and Others: how to understand it and why it is important   13 July 2017. Possibly because Lord Ne...