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Friday, December 01, 2006

Enforcing Patents on CIIs in Germany.

Unlike in the U.S. and the UK, in Germany there is a general rule that court files in civil proceedings are treated as confidential and opened for inspection only if a legitimate interest supporting such a request is demonstrated by third parties. As a habit of tradition, with regard to lower and regional courts only selected decisions are anonymised and then published in law journals in order to keep professionals up to date. Only recently more and more courts start on a large scale publishing shortened and anonymised decisions on the Internet. In practice, this makes it in particular quite difficult to obtain an overall view on numbers and outcomes of patent infringement proceedings based on patents on computer-implemented inventions in Germany.

Anti-patent activists are used to claim that patents on computer-implemented inventions or so-called "software patents" are not only "illegal" but also "unenforceable". See, for instance,

the presentation of Mr. James Heald, FFII UK, at the conference

Software Patents: A Time for Change? held on November 16 and 17, 2006, at MIT and Boston University stating that there are "no examples (yet) of successful litigation in court for infringement". In this context I just stumbled over

a publication on

playfuls.com:

"[...] A District Court in Germany (Landgericht Düsseldorf) today announced verdicts finding that German DVD disc manufacturer Optical Disc Service ('ODS') has infringed certain patents licensed in the MPEG-2 Patent Portfolio License offered by MPEG LA as a result of ODS's manufacture of DVD discs. The verdict of infringement as a result of DVD disc manufacturing issued in eight of nine cases brought by six patent holders who are Licensors to MPEG LA's MPEG-2 Patent Portfolio License. [...]"

OK, one single case does not make up full statistics but at least it shows that FFII is wrong when asserting that so-called "software patents" are generally unenforceable in Germany.

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ODS did not claimed that the patents were invalid.

They have not used art 52.2, and I wonder if they can still use it in appeal.

# posted by zoobab : 01 December, 2006 20:40

They could file a nullity action with the Federal Patents Court (if they have not already done so).

# posted by Axel H Horns : 01 December, 2006 21:55