In an article published in the Journal of Intellectual Property Law & Practice, Trevor Cook reviews patent litigation in English courts in 2019.
Excerpt: In 2019, the English courts hearing patent matters had little cause to make new law, other than to try to deal with some of the consequences of the previous year’s decision of the Court of Appeal in Unwired Planet v Huawei, which had largely upheld the approach at first instance to remedies in cases concerning the infringement of standard-essential patents (SEPs), and which was itself the subject in 2019 of an appeal to the UK Supreme Court. Neither did such courts make any discernable change to existing law, except in the area of employee compensation for inventions of outstanding benefit to the employer, although they provided several useful restatements of the existing law. Despite this, some trends in the case law can be identified, such as increasing reliance on ‘lack of technical contribution obviousness’ in place of ‘claim breadth insufficiency’, thereby aligning UK law more with the approach of the European Patent Office (EPO) Technical Boards of Appeal. One notable, and welcome, omission from the case law in 2019, as in 2018, is that as to unjustified threats as to patent infringement, which used to attract more than its fair share of satellite litigation, suggesting that the reforms enacted in 20171 have had the desired result of making it easier to comply with the law.
