From Around the Blogs: Injunctions

There have been several posts over the past few weeks about injunctions:

1.  On the Kluwer Patent Blog, Claire Phipps-Jones published The Future of UK PIs—Cyanamid, Skat and injunction creep, discussing recent English case law emphasizing the importance of preserving the status quo, at least for relatively short periods of time, even where there are no unusual obstacles to quantifying the parties’  interim harm and there are doubts about patent validity.  Ms. Phipps-Jones also published, on the Kluwer Patent Blog, “Damned if you do and damned if you don’t”—Ex parte PIs at the UPC: how effective are protective letters?, discussing principally MyStromer AG v. Revolt Zycling AG (previously noted here), where the protective letter didn’t succeed in fending off an injunction, and Ortovox v. Mammut, where the failure to file a protective letter may have compromised the defendant’s ability to forestall an injunction.  Ms. Phipps-Jones also coauthored a post with Brian Cordery, again published on the Kluwer Patent Blog, titled The UPC PI Annual (which I hope will in fact become an annual publication).

2. Also on Kluwer, Eden Winlow published First ever permanent injunction at the UPC as the Düsseldorf Local Division issues its final decision in Franz Kaldewei v Bette, and Matthieu Dhenne followed up this morning with Kaldewei vs. Bette:  Lessons from first UPC’s permanent injunction.  Both posts focus principally on the substantive issues relating to validity, the prior user defense, and contributory infringement; M. Dhenne also notes that the court limited the order for withdrawal to cancellation of pending orders only.

3.  On the SpicyIP Blog, Tejashwini Kaushal published Taking a Look at Quia Timet Injunctions in Light of F-Hoffman-LaRoche v. Zydus.  The post discusses a July 9 decision of the Delhi High Court granting a quia timet injunction (and injunction based on a fear of imminent infringement).  The author argues that, although most Indian cases consider quia timet relief cite a Canadian decision, Connaught Labs. Ltd. v. Smithkline Beecham Pharma Inc., [1998] FCJ No 1851, ¶ 18 (stating that “the statement of claim must allege a deliberate expressed intention to engage in activity the result of which would raise a strong possibility of infringement; the activity to be engaged in must be alleged to be imminent and the resulting damage to the plaintiff must be alleged to be very substantial if not irreparable; and, finally, the facts pleaded must be cogent, precise and material”), “there are no established standards for granting interim injunctions in India”; rather, as argued previously by Aparajita Lath in her paper Analyzing the Pitfalls of Indian Patent Injunctions Based on Fear of Infringement, 19 J. Intell. Prop. Rights 253 (2014), “the lack of standards makes the process subjective and speculative.”