An IP lawyer's take on the Eli Lilly v Actavis judgement

5 September 2017

Mark Engelman, head of intellectual property at UK-based law firm Hardwicke, offers his interpretation on a landmark ruling in an Expert View piece.

Gorge Hegel, in his book Phänomenologie des Geistes (1807) asserted: “Absolute knowing is the truth of every mode of consciousness because ... it is only in absolute knowing that the separation of the object from the certainty of itself is completely eliminated: truth is now equated with certainty and certainty with truth.”

This statement was in essence his central philosophy of realism. Whether reality exists or whether we merely perceive it. The concept is not a million miles away from a landmark judgement of the English Supreme Court in Actavis of July 12, 2017, upon the perennial issue surrounding the interpretation of patent claims. Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams might have proved a more reliable source of quotes. Freud considered images in dreams to be freighted with symbolic significance, the symbols or words themselves merely connectors and associations with other meanings.

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