Fair use 2.12Infringement, Remedies and Defences

A rival launches a device that looks suspiciously like yours and you suspect it copies your patented mechanism. Your first instinct is to send a legal notice, but careless threats can themselves land you in court. The rival's first instinct is to say the patent is invalid, or that the product falls in a statutory exception. Who can sue, in which court, for what relief, and what can the defendant say? This topic is where everything you have learned about patents gets tested in a courtroom.

In two minutes

Infringement is doing without the patentee's consent an act that s.48 reserves to him; the suit lies in a court not inferior to a district court (s.104), the reliefs are injunction and damages or an account of profits (s.108), and the defences include invalidity (s.107(1)), the conditions in s.47, and the exceptions in s.107A. The Act has no general fair-use defence.

The rest of this chapter

The full explanation, the cheat sheet, every previous-year question at every mark weight, the quiz and the answer skeletons are part of Intellectual Property Laws on LexBlox Semester. Sign in to unlock the subject, or read Module 1 of Legal Language and Writing free.