Are most patents in Germany valid after all?

In February this year, the IPKat reported on a study that showed that around 80% of all patents subject to a nullity attack in Germany were fully or partially invalidated. My comment at the time was that it was not entirely correct to count all partial invalidations as losses for the patentees, as often amended claims will only add minor limitations that do not effectively stop the enforceability of the patent.

From Hüttermann, Patents - Paper Tigers or Real Tigers?
In a recently published note, Aloys Hüttermann makes an additional point. He argues that only in about 50% of all infringement cases in Germany does the defendant raise a counter-claim for nullity before the Federal Patent Court. In other words - so Hüttermann - in half of the cases, the defendant accepts that the patent is most likely valid and an invalidity claim pointless. If one adds those cases to the overall number of litigated patents,  about 60% rather than only 20% of granted patents are maintained (see table; note that the number of additional cases is somewhat arbitrary, as Hüttermann admits. There are roughly 1,200 infringement proceedings commenced in Germany per year).


If I may add another twist - it could well be that a defendant believes the patent to be invalid but refrains from filing a nullity suit because he believes that his non-infringement arguments are strong and he will prevail in the infringement proceedings. In other words, not filing an invalidity suit is not necessarily indicative of the strength of the asserted patent. Comment section is open...
Are most patents in Germany valid after all? Are most patents in Germany valid after all? Reviewed by Mark Schweizer on Wednesday, May 11, 2016 Rating: 5

4 comments:

  1. There is also the possibility that the Defendant believes the patent is invalid but for reasons of commercial certainty would rather have the dispute resolved speedily on the basis of the infringement issues rather than slowly via the Federal Patent Court.

    ReplyDelete
  2. What about this twist: the patentee who does not start an infringement action because he supposes that his patent would not be held valid anyway and prefers not to have a decision on this issue?

    I think that the sample "litigated patents" is strongly biased anyway. There is no room for litigation where the validity and infringement is clear.

    ReplyDelete
  3. If you want to play around with statistics, you could include the patents which are subject to opposition proceedings and litigation, since in Germany a revocation action cannot be considered while there is a pending opposition.

    ReplyDelete
  4. Surely these 1200 infringement cases are completely dwarfed by a far, far larger number of cases where people simply have no grounds to attack the validity of the patent. So they don't do anything that would infringe it, and there is no court case at all.

    Perhaps someone should do a statistical study to determine the percentage of these statistical studies which are valid.

    ReplyDelete

All comments must be moderated by a member of the IPKat team before they appear on the blog. Comments will not be allowed if the contravene the IPKat policy that readers' comments should not be obscene or defamatory; they should not consist of ad hominem attacks on members of the blog team or other comment-posters and they should make a constructive contribution to the discussion of the post on which they purport to comment.

It is also the IPKat policy that comments should not be made completely anonymously, and users should use a consistent name or pseudonym (which should not itself be defamatory or obscene, or that of another real person), either in the "identity" field, or at the beginning of the comment. Current practice is to, however, allow a limited number of comments that contravene this policy, provided that the comment has a high degree of relevance and the comment chain does not become too difficult to follow.

Learn more here: http://ipkitten.blogspot.com/p/want-to-complain.html

Powered by Blogger.