Singapore - Patent Infringement

In a rare patent case to come before the Singapore Court of Appeal, FR Global Pte Ltd v. Trek Technology Ltd, the court followed the purposive claim construction approach adopted by the House of Lords in Kirin-Amgen v. Hoecsht Marion Roussel Ltd. to hold that a claim directed to a data storage device that could be “coupled” to a computer serial bus was infringed even though the accused device could plug into a port on the computer and did not require any intermediate cabling.

The court also rejected an allegation by the defendants that amendments of the claim made during the litigation should not have been allowed. While noting that post-grant amendment of claims is discretionary, the Court of Appeal agreed with the trial court that, in general, amendments should be allowed unless there was bad faith on the part of the patentee or there was an effect on the public by the retention of an invalid claim prior to amendment.