Prof. Cotter Quoted in Bloomberg Law on Proposed Change to German Patent Law

A January 24, 2020 article on Bloomberg Law, entitled “Pressure Grows to Stop Automatic Product Bans in EU Patent Rows,” discusses a proposed amendment to the German Patent Act that would, among other things, grant German courts greater flexibility to deny or delay the entry of injunctive relief in patent infringement actions. The amendment also would require the German Patent Court—the forum that challenges to patent validity, which are “bifurcated” from, and typically much slower than, infringement actions, to issue a preliminary assessment of patent validity within six months. The article quotes Professor Tom Cotter—who has written about the proposed amendment on his blog, Comparative Patent Remedies—who states that the proposed amendment might “lead to the German courts being more receptive to entering these delayed injunctions in certain types of cases.” Cotter also states that the proposed six-month rule may help to close the “injunction gap”—the delay between the resolution of an infringement and a related validity action—which arguably has given “patent owners undue leverage over implementers.”