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...
Standard Essential Patents at the European UPC
The Chinese company Huawei has apparently become the first company to file a patent infringement suit based on a standard essential patent in the new European Unitary Patent Court (UPC), according to a report in the IAM magazine. So-called "Standard Essential Patents" (abbreviated to SEPs) are patents protecting a technology required...
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...
Unified Patent Court – Central Divisions
One of the open issues relating to the Unified Patent Court (UPC) was the question of the location of the Central Division that was originally scheduled to be located in London. The withdrawal of the United Kingdom from the European Union meant that a new location needed to be selected....
European Unified Patent – which countries does it include?
The start of the new Unified Patent in Europe has now been confirmed for 1 June 2023. It will be possible after this date to request that any European patents granted after this date can be validated as a so-called Unitary Patent covering a number of European countries. The Unitary...