The Düsseldorf location has been one of the most active courts in national German patent litigations and widely used by international patentees. It has now issued the first known ex-parte injunction in the Unified Patent Court (UPC). The patent in dispute relates to EP2546134 which is a “Combination structure of...
File Wrapper Estoppel in the Unified Patent Court
File-wrapper estoppel (also call "prosecution history estoppel") is a term used to indicate that an applicant of a patent application that has made "narrowing amendments" to the claims of the patent application, for example to take into account prior art, may be precluded from broadening the scope of their granted claims to...
Record Patent Grants in Germany
The German Patent and Trade Mark Office (DPMA) reports granted 23,592 patents last year - 11.7% higher than the previous year, and the greatest number for over 30 years. The number of incoming applications at 57,214 was down by 2.3% compared to last year. Foreign (non-German) applications filed 20,020 applications,...
Music streaming in Germany – How fair is the remuneration of music creators?
In September 2022, Goldmedia GmbH presented a study on music streaming in Germany. The study was originally commissioned by GEMA (the German copyright collecting association). The turnover of music streaming services, also known as Digital Service Providers (DSP), continues to grow rapidly and the music industry hopes to be able...
Musikstreaming in Deutschland – Wie fair ist die Vergütung der Musikschaffenden?
Im Auftrag der GEMA hat die Goldmedia GmbH diesen Monat eine Studie zum Musikstreaming in Deutschland vorgelegt. Die Umsätze von Musik-Streamingdiensten wachsen weiterhin rasant an und die Musikindustrie erhofft sich durch diese Dienste, auch im digitalen Zeitalter noch profitabel agieren zu können. 45 % der Deutschen nutzen mittlerweile Dienste wie...
Classifying Spam – not patentable in Europe
The challenges in obtaining European patent protection for inventions in the field of artificial intelligence have been highlighted in a recent decision by the European Patent Office’s Board of Appeal in dealing with a European patent application Nr. 14725807.3 by Google for “classifying resources using a deep network”. The patent...
How does the EUIPO deal with virtual goods, non-fungible tokens and the metaverse?
Companies are offering a wide range of products and services relating to Web 3.0. Many of these goods and services are completely new and no legal framework is in place on how to classify and deal with these products and services. This also includes Intellectual Property Rights as national and...
Neural Networks are not Inventive
A recent German Patent Court decision No. 19 W (pat) 7/22 from 1 June 2022 reflected the practice of the European Patent Office in assessing the inventive step of an invention employing machine learning or artificial intelligence. The German Court decided that the mere inclusion of a reference to a...
Wie spitze ist die Marke Spezi?
Vor dem Landgericht München I wurde kürzlich darüber verhandelt, inwiefern die Paulaner-Brauerei Lizenzgebühren für den von ihr vertriebenen „Paulaner Spezi“ an die Brauerei Riegele in Augsburg leisten muss. Die Brauerei Riegele vertreibt selbst ein Cola-Mix-Getränk mit dem Namen Spezi und hat gegen Paulaner geklagt. Es ist unbestritten, dass die Brauerei...
Industrial Technologies 2022 Grenoble
This week three of our colleagues (Robert Harrison, Kilian Müller, and Eva Magd) took part in the EU-organised conference on Industrial Technologies 2022, held in Grenoble (France). The event is designed for research and technology organizations (RTOs), representatives of industrial companies as well as policymakers to discuss current trends, challenges...