Committing an infringement

Your competitor believes that you are infringing one of its patents. This is irksome, as it presents an impending hindrance to your commercial activities. Arnold + Siedsma can support you in contesting the claim with (substantive) defence, both legal and technical.

A Dutch or Belgian patent which has been formally granted will not have been substantively assessed, so you will have to estimate the extent to which the patent is valid.

You may be summoned before the court, whereby the patent holder requires you to cease your activities. If, for example, the patent concerned has been substantively examined, for example by the European Patent Office, you must generally assume that the patent is valid, unless you have information which was not taken into account in the examination.

The question as to whether a party is perhaps committing an infringement and whether the patent concerned is valid is examined in aninfringement assessment drawn up by one of the Arnold + Siedsma patent attorneys.

To conduct an infringement assessment, the patent attorney and lawyer examine exactly what method and/or device is involved in your case, and what variants of this method or device are possible in your situation. If you already apply the method or if the device already exists, the specialists will visit you to carry out an inspection, as all details may be relevant, including those which you do not expect to be relevant. Moreover, your patent attorney will further scrutinise the patent. He will examine not only the text of the patent document (claims, description and example embodiments), but also the literature in which the prior art is described. He will also investigate how the grant of patent proceeded and examine any arguments used by both the patent applicant and the patenting body.

Once your patent attorney has analysed all this information, he may, possibly together with the lawyer, provide an infringement assessment, in which he indicates how likely it is that specific forms of patent fall or do not fall within the scope of protection of the patent concerned. It will be clear to you that a thorough assessment of infringement normally requires a great deal of work, depending on the complexity.

Despite everything, an infringement assessment remains an estimate. If you want to know for sure whether a specific activity infringes a patent, you can always decide to bring this question before a court.