Sedley LJ said: ‘Because the law has historically been suspicious of monopolies for well-known reasons of public policy, there is no useful analogy between a patent and a deed or a written contract. The latter two will have been drafted for a purpose which, assuming it not to be illegal or contrary to public policy, the law will do what it properly can to uphold. A patent, by publicising an invention, makes it the patentee’s sole property for 20 years, so that the patentee’s immediate interests are in opposition to those of the rest of the world. It is in society’s longer-term interests that, by setting the two things in balance, genuine innovation should be protected and rewarded without stifling further invention. Lord Davey’s approach, and any analogue of it, would reward opaque drafting as objectionably as the infringers’ defence in cases like Edison Phonograph seeks out opacity where, on a fair-minded reading, there is none. The Convention and Protocol place such exercises off limits in a way which, it seems to me, our law well understands and which sits comfortably with the wording and intent of section 125(1).’
Lord Justice Aldous Lord Justice Sedley Mr Justice Lindsay
[2003] EWCA Civ 872, [2003] RPC 49
Bailii
England and Wales
Cited by:
Cited – Warner-Lambert Company Llc v Generics (UK) Ltd (T/A Mylan) and Another SC 14-Nov-2018
These proceedings raise, for the first time in the courts of the United Kingdom, the question how the concepts of sufficiency and infringement are to be applied to a patent relating to a specified medical use of a known pharmaceutical compound. Four . .
Lists of cited by and citing cases may be incomplete.
Updated: 18 October 2021; Ref: scu.184230
