This paper introduces and analyzes three important court deci-sions in patent infringement cases rendered in the past three years in Japan. All of these decisions were by the Grand Panel of Japanese “Intellectual Property High Court” which was established in 2005.
The first case is related to the enforcement of standard essential patents (SEPs). The main issue in this case is as follows. If a SEPs holder has made a commitment to license its SEPs on FRAND (fair, reasonable, and non-discriminatory) terms, should there be any re-striction on the SEPs holder’s right to seek an injunction and damag-es based on such SEPs?
The second case is related to the calculation of damages. It deals with the issue regarding whether the provision, which pre-sumes that the amount of profits earned by the infringer is the amount of damages sustained by the patentee, is applicable in the case where a patentee itself has not worked a patented invention.
The third case is concerning so-called product-by-process claims. It deals with the issue regarding how to define the technical scope of such claims in the context of finding patent infringement as well as judging the validity of the patent.