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Comment by goggles99 | Hacker News Reader

>we don’t really have a German or UK or whatever patent system any more, we have a European Union one. So this German case doesn’t apply just to Germany, it applies right across the EU

This has got to be false information. It was mentioned that this was a ruling of the Federal Patent Court of Germany, BPatG. Since when does a German patent court dictate EU patent laws and rulings? does this mean that if a patent court in another EU country ruled the other way that that is now the new EU stance? This makes no logical sense.

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"A patent granted by the EPO does not lead to a single European Union-wide patent enforceable before one single court, but rather to independent national patents enforceable by national courts according to different national legislations and procedures."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_patent_law

Other information I find have the same consequence (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Patent_Convention#Oppo...):

"A European patent is also non-unitary in that it may be revoked in one Contracting State while maintained in another. However, a national court in one Contracting State may not revoke a European patent in another Contracting State."

This is a bit surprising. At the beginning of the Samsung vs Apple trials, also in Germany, it was widely reported that the german ruling would have EU-wide effects. Those were patent cases as well...

Maybe the difference is between invalidating patents and deciding whether a patent is infringed by another party.

Samsung v Apple did as far as I know not have any effects outside Germany so I believe that was just false information.

Not really sure why you got downvoted for this, but I am pretty sure what you say is true right now. While the EU is moving to a unified patent court in the future for now after the patent has been granted it has to be individually litigated in each country as it becomes just a bunch of seperate national patents.

It' also noteworthy that the European Patent Office is not part of the EU.

IANAL but maybe this means it could set a precedent that other countries should consider/follow for similar rulings? Again, I don't really know, feel free to ignore this post.

IANAL, and I am not the one being quoted... with that said, it seems to me that you're reading way too much into that statement, and in the process, more-or-less ignoting the context. To me, what's being implied here is precedent...

IANALE, but my understanding is that precedent, though a primary principle of common law legal systems, is of somewhat lesser importance in systems arising from other traditions. That's not to say the ruling cannot possibly have any significance, only that the bookmakers' windows are still open.

As I understand it the EPC requires that certain parts of national patent law are read to agree with the convention. So patentability, novelty and the basic building blocks should therefore be harmonised [to some extent] across member states.

The patent courts therefore take in to account rulings in patent courts of other member states and ruling of European patent boards (I forget the exact terminology, sorry). Such rulings are not binding however. So they form what might be considered a weak precedent. (See for example S6(iii)-(iv), or indeed all of Section 6, http://www.ipo.gov.uk/2006ewcaciv1371.pdf "Aerotel/Macrossan"; it's almost boilerplate in these decisions actually as in "Symbian", http://www.bailii.org/ew/cases/EWCA/Civ/2008/1066.html)

In this case it is novelty that is at stake. Novelty is novelty, the same tests are used in Germany as in, say, UK because they rely on the European rulings that provided a series of tests to establish that the novelty lies in a suitably technical part of the invention (this born out of interpretation of the non-patentability of "computer programs as such" in Europe).

IANA(P)L, this is not legal advice.

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