A design registration for a contact lens cleaning device was cancelled because the design did not and had not at the time of registration belonged solely to the registered proprietor. However the claimant's unregistered design rights in certain aspects of the design for a prototype lens cleaning device were valid and had been infringed by the defendants.
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The defendants had infringed the database right which subsisted in a list compiled by the claimant of mobile phone permanent memory absolute (PM abs) addresses, which could be used to recover evidence for criminal investigations. The defendant law enforcement agency and individual police officer had also acted in breach of confidence by posting a substantial part of the database on an internet forum and making copies for their own use. However copyright did not subsist in the PM abs address list ...
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The exclusive licensee of a patent which had been held valid and infringed would not be deprived of its costs in a period when, having previously registered its exclusive licence, a further licence was entered into on substantially the same terms without being separately registered. The statutory purpose of the provisions in s.68 of the Patents Act 1977 was to inform the public as to who had control of the patent. The details of the licence did not matter, and so a mere variation of the licence ...
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In a claim for infringement of a patent for a medical injector device used in the treatment of various autoimmune diseases, where the main issue at trial was likely to be the question of how the allegedly infringing product worked, it was appropriate to admit the defendants' evidence of experiments which they said showed that their product worked in a non-infringing way. The decisive factor was that the experiments went directly to the central issue, and it was hard to see how that issue could o ...
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Following the grant of an injunction, based on Directive 2001/29 art 8(3), requiring BT qua ISP to block access to a website which provided links to pirated films, certain ancillary matters were decided as follows. It was implicit in Recital 59 of the Directive that the costs of implementing the measures required by the injunction should be borne by the intermediary, BT. This should be regarded as one of the costs of carrying on the profitable business of providing internet services. As to the c ...
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The claimant's unregistered design rights in a number of designs for caravan towing covers had not been infringed by its competitors because on the evidence it was not likely that the defendants had, as alleged, followed a concerted campaign of copying and of lying to cover up that copying. The similarities between the products were attributable to the defendants having conceived the design ideas independently and then followed broadly the same design logic as the claimant. Some of the features ...
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An appeal was dismissed against a decision that Dyson's registered design for a vacuum cleaner was not infringed by Vax's product. The judge had not made a relevant error of principle, and had allowed that Dyson's design was entitled to a broad scope of protection because of the differences between it and the pre-existing design corpus, and the high degree of design freedom. On the basis of a number of substantial differences between the designs, the judge had been entitled to conclude that Vax' ...
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Following a decision that N had infringed I's patent, N claimed that certain relief was precluded by s.63(2) of the Patents Act 1977. The court found that, since that section was amended in 2006, the burden of proof no longer lay on the patentee to establish that the patent specification had been framed with good faith and reasonable skill and knowledge. S.63(2) was not intended as a sanction against careless drafting or bad faith when those matters had no bearing on the remedy sought.
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An appeal was allowed against a decision that a European patent concerning a human protein called Neutrokine-alpha was invalid for failure to satisfy the requirement of industrial applicability in art. 57 EPC. The patent disclosed the existence of the protein, its structure, its encoding DNA and its likely membership of the TNF ligand superfamily, probable properties and possible therapeutic uses. Following the High Court's decision that the industrial applicability was too speculative, the EPO ...
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An application was granted to the company entitled to exploit the rights of the artist Lady Gaga (including the trade mark LADY GAGA) for an interim injunction restricting the use which could be made by the respondent of an animated parody character, Lady Goo Goo, and its parody song. The court found that some consumers might believe that the parody was connected to or approved by the artist. The balance of convenience, having regard to the status quo and the merits of each case, lay in favour o ...
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