Review of the year in German patent litigation 2019

Abstract

... The question of whether the requirement of an inventive step (section 1(1) of the German Patent Code (GPC)) was met in a case where the plaintiff argued that the technical method had already been disclosed in one specific part of another patent was subject of a recent 2019 decision of the German Federal Supreme Court (Bundesgerichtshof).1 In this case, the defendant was the owner of a patent covering a method for bit-rate reduction in the coding of a signal which is used in image or video data processing. This case had already been subject to an earlier decision of the German Federal Supreme Court,2 which ultimately referred the case back to the Federal Patent Court for further examination of patentability. Eventually, the Federal Patent Court declared the patent invalid due to the lack of an inventive step. The Federal Patent Court basically argued that the last paragraph in a US patent had already provided an alternative to the described method, which was then disclosed in the defendant’s patent.