German Federal Supreme Court Decides About Products Directly Obtained by a Patent Protected Method

In a decision of August 21, 2012, the German Federal Supreme Court (X ZR 33/10) decided that video data sets representing a sequence of video pictures can be a product protected under Article 9, sentence 2, number 3 German Patent Act, as an item directly obtained by a patent protected method. Because this sequence of data is to be regarded as a product directly obtained by a patent protected decoding process for video pictures, the product protection extends to data storage media, storing the sequence of data which are obtained according to the inventive process.