Patent infringement procedures are an instrument whereby the patentee defends his protected invention against unlawful use by a third party (the alleged infringer). The difficulty is that the patent is no solid object whose damage can be easily detected; it belongs to that group of rights whose infringement is not easy to determine. The patent is a right described by words, and those words, written into a claim, are so complicated that laymen and lawyers alike fail to understand them. This is the special feature which distinguishes the patent right.
This book consists of a series of country reports in which expert patent attorneys describe the patent infringement procedures in their jurisdiction. Since the first edition of this book was published in 2000, developments in the field of patent enforcement have been significant and required a major rewriting of all the seven original contributions (the UK, Germany, France, the Netherlands, Italy, Japan and the US): more than 100 decisions have been added. For the second edition, another eight countries have been included: three from Eastern Europe (Poland, the Czech Republic and Hungary), two from Asia (China and Korea), two from Latin America (Argentina and Brazil), and one from Europe (Switzerland) and there is a new chapter by Dieter Stauder on European issues of patent enforcement: cross-border litigation, cross-border assistance in obtaining evidence, and the new European Enforcement Directive.
