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Read the latest news and briefings from the team at Schlich about real cases involving patents, trade marks and designs.

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Directors Off the Hook: Supreme Court Rules No Personal Liability in Lifestyle Equities CV v Ahmed

Does the recent UK Supreme Court provide company directors with a ‘Get out of jail free card’ for personal liability?

September 2024

What Satisfies the Palate of the EPO’s Boards of Appeal? Fish Oil and Fruit Juice, Apparently…

In a recent decision, the EPO’s Boards of Appeal have confirmed the importance of filing data to support arguments relating to sufficiency of disclosure in EPO opposition proceedings. The patent concerned related to a mixture of fish oil and fruit juice which was alleged to have anticancer properties. The opponent argued the constituents required to achieve the anticancer effect were not sufficiently disclosed, but failed to provide enough data to convince the Board of Appeal. Hence, the Board was satisfied the claimed composition was sufficiently disclosed and ordered that the patent be maintained in amended form.

August 2024

Scientific beakers filled with coloured liquid

Boards of Appeal Introduce New Broad Interpretation of “Substance or Composition” in the Context of Second Medical Use Claims

In this decision the Board has diverged from previous case law establishing that second medical use claims were restricted to products having a chemical mode of action and instead the Board ruled that “substance or composition” should stretch to any product which may be defined by its chemical composition, regardless of the mode of action.

August 2024

First Revocation Decision of the UPC Confirms the European Approach to Antibody Inventions

This case represents the first revocation issued by the UPC and so gives several useful insights into the way in which the court will apply the law.

August 2024

German Court Confirms That Two Means Two and Three Means Three – A Stripy Dispute Between Adidas and Nike

In this case, the Higher Regional Court of Düsseldorf decided that Adidas could not enforce its registered trade mark for trousers having three stripes along their side against Nike’s trousers having only two stripes along their side. This case highlights the limits of protection conferred by figurative trade marks, particularly those involving relatively simple patterns.

July 2024

What’s in a name? – SCOTUS Confirms Names cannot be Registered as Trade Marks

This ruling upheld the decision that trade mark registrations cannot be the name of a living person without their permission, and that this revocation is not unconstitutional. However, the Justices could not unanimously agree on why this ruling has been upheld. In 2018, an application to register the mark “TRUMP TOO SMALL” was filed in […]

July 2024

Food for fork: stretchy cheese and contradictory post-filed evidence

T 0629/22 considered how the credibility of a claimed invention should be addressed in the face of contradictory evidence

July 2024

Therapeutic Effect – a Higher Bar for Novelty than for Sufficiency at the EPO

EPO medical use claims are interpreted to include the physiological or technical effect of the treatment as being a functional feature of the claim. However, this interpretation yields different bars for novelty and sufficiency, as confirmed by EPO TBA Decision T 0209/22.

July 2024

New Hope for Antibody Claims in the US

However, in a significant development we now report, means-plus-function language for a claim to an antibody complied with both of the USPTO requirements for written description and for the claim not to be indefinite. Where functional language alone is used in US claims, such claims commonly attract written description and enablement objections. Enablement requires that […]

July 2024

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