A controlled release oxycodone formulation for administration to human patients, comprising:
(a) an analgesically effective amount of spheroids comprising oxycodone or a salt thereof and a spheronising agent;
(b) each spheroid being coated with a film coating which controls the release of the oxycodone or oxycodone salt at a controlled rate in an aqueous medium.
"Construction, whether of a patent or any other document, is of course not directly concerned with what the author meant to say. There is no window into the mind of the patentee or the author of any other document. Construction is objective in the sense that it is concerned with what a reasonable person to whom the utterance was addressed would have understood the author to be using the words to mean. Notice, however, that it is not, as is sometimes said, "the meaning of the words the author used", but rather what the notional addressee would have understood the author to mean by using those words. The meaning of words is a matter of convention, governed by rules, which can be found in dictionaries and grammars. What the author would have been understood to mean by using those words is not simply a matter of rules. It is highly sensitive to the context of and background to the particular utterance. It depends not only upon the words the author has chosen but also upon the identity of the audience he is taken to have been addressing and the knowledge and assumptions which one attributes to that audience." (paragraph 32)
Floyd J went on to conclude that the patents were valid, and not obvious in light of the cited prior art (though the IPKat wonders how valuable they are now, if they can be worked around so easily).
The IPKat thinks that this case demonstrates that there are cases where meticulous verbal analysis is definitely required to figure out what a patent actually claims, as otherwise it would be difficult to show where the boundaries of the invention lie. It didn't help, however, in this case that some of the claims were apparently (in the words of Floyd J) "very poorly drafted", making the task of figuring out what they meant even more difficult than usual. This might be an effect of hindsight, but the IPKat wonders why, for such an important (i.e. money making) drug, the claims in this case were not drafted better. Could Napp not afford a patent attorney who understood how to draft dependent claims? And how did this get past Article 84 requirements at the EPO?