AP Racing Ltd v Alcon Components Ltd [2015] EWHC 1371 (IPEC) is a decision of Judge Hacon, sitting in the Intellectual Property Enterprise Court (IPEC), England and Wales, on 15 May, relating to infringement of a patent for calipers. This decision established something that, in theory, we may well have assumed anyway -- but it's good to spell it out to patent litigants. The message? That, as a general rule, in cheap-and-cheerful IPEC proceedings a patentee whose patent has been shown at trial to be infringed will not be entitled to litigate a broader range of infringements in an account of profits, or in an inquiry as to damages, than those included in his original infringement claim. However, as an exception to that general rule, where a patentee has no reason to know of those other infringements until after the case management conference, the most expeditious way forward is for the court to consider further allegations in the inquiry or account -- if this can be done without having to deal with additional evidence.
In making this statement of general principle, Judge Hacon stated that the patentee is under no general duty to exercise reasonable diligence to ascertain whether he has a potential further cause of action against the defendant. However, he added, a lack of diligence where the further claim would have been apparent to a reasonable claimant early in the proceedings, if he had only exercised reasonable diligence, could tip a claimant's attempt to deal with further infringements at the remedy stage into the category of abuse of process -- though it wasn't an abuse of process in this instance.
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