AKEBIA THERAPEUTICS INC v FIBROGEN, INC

H1 Patents – European patents – Pharmaceuticals – Treatment of anaemia – Revocation – Infringement – Construction – Obviousness – Obvious to try – Reasonable expectation of success – Hindsight – Expert evidence – Sequential unmasking – Insufficiency – Excessive claim breadth – Uncertainty – Identification of technical contribution – Principles of general application – Plausibility – Undue burden – AgrEvo obviousness – Equivalence – File prosecution history – Process limited product claims – Indirect infringement – Means relating to an essential element of the invention – Whether suitable for putting and intended to put invention into effect – “Off-label” use – State of mind of defendants – Intentions of prescribing clinicians – Quia timet claims – Whether stay of infringement claim appropriate

IPCOM GMBH & CO KG v VODAFONE GROUP PLC

H1 Patents – Standards essential patents – Technical trial – Construction – Validity – Conditional and unconditional amendments – Added matter – Extension of protection – Obviousness – Essentiality – Infringement – Indirect infringement – Defences – Crown use – De minimis use – Declarations of non-infringement

Multi-party patent infringement litigation in China

Recently, parties have begun to implement patents separately to avoid legal liability in China. Multi-party infringing behaviours are more complicated to legally characterize than single-party patent infringement. Before the recently proposed legislative reform, the Patent Law of China did not clearly define indirect infringement. Chinese courts usually apply the joint torts rules to deal with those cases. However, by mixing the rule of joint injurious act with the rule of indirect patent infringement, the courts tend to confuse the two. Moreover, the newly drafted Revision of Patent Law, though it proposes adopting the indirect infringement concept, still borrows the joint torts rules to allocate liabilities. In these circumstances, it is necessary to clarify the relationship between joint torts and indirect infringement, and thus to clarify the rules for multi-party patent infringement.