Regeneron and insufficiency

The Court of Appeal judgment in Regeneron Pharmaceuticals, Inc v Kymab Ltd & Anor [2018] EWCA Civ 671 (28 March 2018) reviewed the law on insufficiency, and in particular the extent to which and the manner in which an invention must be enabled across the whole scope of the claim.

Overturning the first instance judge’s finding, the Court set out three principles drawn from previous case law, and concluded that the judge ‘did not attach sufficient weight to the character of the invention as claimed in each of the claims in issue, the contribution that its disclosure has made to the art and the need to confer a fair degree of protection on the patentee’.

The judgment drew heavily on a number of opinions by Lord Hoffmann, the former Law Lord. Coincidentally, Lord Hoffmann himself this month spoke publicly for the first time about last year’s judgment Eli Lilly and Company v Actavis UK Limited and others [2017] UKSC 48, with which he said he had ‘great difficulty’.

Other judgments covered this month

Patents

Edwards Lifesciences LLC & Ors v Boston Scientific Scimed Inc [2018] EWCA Civ 673 (28 March 2018) – a Court of Appeal judgment on obviousness and expert witnesses.

Conversant Wireless Licensing SARL v Huawei Technologies Co. Ltd & Ors [2018] EWHC 808 (Pat) (16 April 2018) – a High Court judgment on justiciability and jurisdiction in a FRAND dispute.

IT

Case C-320/16 Uber France SAS v Nabil Bensalem [ECLI:EU:C:2018:221] – a CJEU decision on whether the UberPop service constitutes an ‘Information Society service’ under the InfoSoc Directive.

NT 1 & NT 2 v Google LLC [2018] EWHC 799 (QB) (13 April 2018) – two cases regarding the ‘right to be forgotten’ and Google’s obligation to delist search results.

The IP/IT Briefing is part of the Bloomsbury Law Online Service. The full briefing is available here.