The Information Technology & Innovation Foundation (ITIF) released a report last week that calls on the G7 countries to bring Japan’s “Data Free Flow with Trust” (DFFT) initiative to life. According to Japan’s Digital Agency, the goal of DFFT is to promote the free flow of data through transparency while ensuring security and IP rights. The ITIF wrote, “building an open, rules-based, rights-respecting, and innovative global digital economy will depend on a small group of ambitious countries working together—such as at the DFFT—in a flexible format to draw in relevant international organizations and other interested countries and stakeholders.”
On July 29, 2022, a Japanese Internet service company published a press release that surprised IP practitioners in Japan. DWANGO INC., the appellant and the plaintiff, lost patent infringement litigation against FC2, Inc., a U.S. based content provider, and another party, (FC2), at the Tokyo district court in September, 2018. The press release announced that DWANGO won over FC2 in the appeal at the Intellectual Property High Court (IPHC), which is similar to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit in the United States. The IPHC determined that, while respective programs at issue in the present case were transmitted from servers outside Japan, it would be substantially unjust if liability for patent infringement could be easily avoided by locating a piece of equipment, such as a server, outside of Japan in today’s digital society.
In the United States, claims directed to methods of treating/diagnosing human disease are patentable. On the other hand, in Japan, such claims are unpatentable. Therefore, the applicant is required to rewrite or delete the claims when a patent application (e.g., Patent Cooperation Treaty application) containing such claims enters the Japanese national phase and is examined. In this article, I offer my personal views on how to rewrite method-of-treatment claims for Japanese examination. I will particularly focus on claims that may or may not conform to Japanese patent practice while past Japanese patent cases and the current patent system are taken into account.
In the United States and other countries, there is a growing awareness and increasing appreciation of the purpose and value of amicus curiae practice as an aid in adjudicative decision-making. The role of an amicus curiae (“friend of the court”) brief in support of a party, or in support of no party, is to supply, voluntarily, the presiding court or other tribunal in cases of controversy with pertinent information, insights, or arguments in a formal, publicly accessible manner. Toward that end, a well-written amicus brief is one that is useful to the decision-maker(s) in calling attention to relevant or material factual or legal aspects of the issue(s) in contention – aspects that the decision-maker(s) or the party-litigants may not have been aware of or able to develop fully.
Patents involving antibody medicines (antibody patents) are largely grouped into patents specified by antibody amino acid sequences (antibody sequence-based patents) and those not (non-sequence-based patents). Non-sequence-based patents have a broad scope and are thus very useful for protecting antibody medicines. Here, I investigate a recent trend in antibody patents characterized by an antibody-binding site in an antigen.