High Court: Patents Court judgments, 2020

Under Practice Direction 51U, a document may be an adverse document even where its relevance or comparability is disputed. The court may order disclosure…

An application for specific disclosure made after the case management conference under the Shorter Trials Scheme requires good reason. Where a settlement…

Default judgment may be entered on properly pleaded, unopposed allegations where those allegations disclose legally proper claims. Summary judgment requiring…

For obviousness, the skilled person must approach prior art without hindsight or an expectation that it will solve the patent’s problem. A document’s failure…

In patent proceedings, case management should ordinarily seek to resolve related validity and infringement issues at one trial. A patentee should be required…

For a second medical use patent, novelty requires an enabling disclosure of the claimed therapeutic effect, not merely disclosure of the medicament or another…

Where a patent has previously been upheld and a certificate of contested validity has been granted, Patents Act 1977, section 65(2) generally requires…

At a case management stage, an issue is an “issue for disclosure” where its fair resolution may require reference to contemporaneous documents. The existence…

Damages for infringement of a UK patent cannot include sums attributable solely to sales or dealings outside the patent’s territory unless those acts were…

In multi-patent litigation, the court should seek to identify an overall successful party for the purpose of making a fair costs order, where the proceedings…

Where parties agree a stay on terms that specify when it may be lifted and the consequences of lifting it, the agreed trigger may itself constitute the…

For patent construction, “conversion” may comprise both rendering measurements comparable and expressing them in the receiving system’s format. The court must…

In a patent action concerning vaccine formulations, a claim specifying that pneumococcal polysaccharides “are” a listed set of serotypes was construed as…

Confidentiality designations in patent and competition litigation are exceptional departures from ordinary court procedure. They must be limited to the…

A patent claim must be construed as a whole, by reference to the skilled reader and the specification, without importing limitations from particular…

The Patents Act 1977 establishes an exhaustive scheme governing entitlement to a patent. The inventor is the actual deviser of the invention and must be a…

Confidentiality rings are exceptional restrictions on the ordinary disclosure regime. They require case-specific justification and careful judicial scrutiny…

The decision whether to refer questions to the Court of Justice is discretionary. Even where the opportunity for a reference is about to expire, the court may…

A successful party may recover costs incurred on alternative issues which were not decided, where those issues formed part of the unsuccessful party’s overall…

Accessory liability for intellectual-property infringement requires more than trivial assistance to the primary tortfeasor, assistance pursuant to a common…

In managing complex patent proceedings, the court may schedule a later trial of recently pleaded issues where doing so accords with the overriding objective…

Summary judgment in a patent action requires the court to have the evidence needed to decide the issue fairly. A patent construction issue is not automatically…

Patent claims are construed purposively, using the description and drawings to balance fair protection with reasonable certainty. A claim requiring a supply…

Under the Shorter Trials Scheme, the court may fix a trial date before the case management conference where the scheme permits early listing. Fixing an early…

When a successful patentee seeks to enforce an injunction pending an appeal, the court must seek to achieve the balance of justice. The aim is to arrange…

An application to expedite a patent trial requires a good reason established by evidence. A mere wish for commercial certainty is insufficient. Relevant…

Where an interim injunction is granted on the balance of convenience, costs will ordinarily be reserved because the injunction holds the ring until trial and…

On an application for an interim injunction, the court must apply the structured approach in American Cyanamid Co v Ethicon Ltd [1975] AC 396. The merits…

In a quia timet patent infringement claim, the relevant question is whether the pleaded material gives a real prospect of establishing at trial that the…

On an appeal from a patent hearing officer, the court should not interfere with findings on obviousness absent an error of principle, failure to consider…

In a patent dispute concerning HIF-PH inhibitors, the court held that broad claims covering enormous classes of compounds were insufficient where the…

When deciding whether to extend time or adjourn a listed trial during the COVID-19 pandemic, the court must balance the pandemic’s impact against the proper…

Under Civil Procedure Rules 1998, r 19.2, a party should be joined where there is a properly arguable claim against it and it is desirable for related…

A patent claim must be construed according to its language read in context, without importing limitations from the specification absent good reason. In…

A final injunction is the normal remedy for infringement of a valid patent. The court may refuse or qualify it on public-interest grounds, but the jurisdiction…

Under the SPC Regulation, the duration of a supplementary protection certificate is calculated under Article 13, but its expiry may occur earlier under Article…

Patent infringement remains an objective inquiry. The doctrine of equivalents does not introduce the defendant’s intention or state of mind as an element of…

Patent claims are construed purposively through the eyes of the skilled addressee and in the context of the invention. A requirement that a filtration layer be…

Issue estoppel requires a final determination between the same parties of an issue fundamental to the earlier decision, where the later issue is the same.…

Applications to vary an order for Extended Disclosure in proceedings governed by the Disclosure Pilot are determined under its specific requirements. The…

Summary judgment is appropriate where a claim or defence has no realistic, rather than fanciful, prospect of success and there is no other compelling reason…

Infringement and essentiality of a telecommunications patent must be assessed claim by claim and by reference to the patent’s proper construction. Added matter…

The court has a wide discretion to permit withdrawal of an admission. The decision turns on all the circumstances, and an adequate explanation is not a…

In patent validity proceedings, a claim must be assessed according to its construction and the disclosure of the prior art, without importing the invention’s…