Dirk Bühler

This handbook provides an expert overview of the law surrounding pharmaceutical, biological and chemical patents. The topic of chemical and biological patents is of special importance in European and German patent law. The highly technical nature of patents in this area gives rise to special problems for patent lawyers in understanding, for instance, structural alterations like polymorphism and enantiomerism, which lead to a derivative of a substance that is comprised in the prior art. It is a legal question whether and under what circumstances such alterations are treated as novel, and in which cases they are part of the state of the art. Even if a substance is prior art, a new medical use can be patented. Dealing with natural occurrences of a substance is also a problem for patent law, as is the difficulty of understanding how different identifications of a substance and the resulting patents interrelate with each other. This book provides an expert overview of all these questions. Past decisions of the European Court of Justice (ECJ) concerning broccoli and tomato patents, as well as embryonic stem cells, have highlighted the importance of this field of law. Most of the proceedings regarding chemical and biological patents have been held in German courts, and the German jurisprudence has often been the basis for ECJ decisions. Thus, German case law is used to illustrate the commentary.

English summary: Tilting moments in physics, sculptural reflections of (in)stabilities in Barnett Newman's artistic work, bridge constructions in earthquake-prone areas - this volume presents a wide variety of interdisciplinary approaches between the poles of equilibrium and non-equilibrium, stability and instability, order and crisis. German description: Barnett Newmans Plastik "Broken Obelisk", Tanzfiguren in Bewegung und Balance sowie (Nicht-) und (Un-)Gleichgewicht als Zustande in der Physik haben vieles gemeinsam: Ordnung und Krise, Norm und Ambivalenz, Stabilitat und Instabilitat. Dabei werden diese Begriffspaare, die in ihrer Wahrnehmung kulturell konstruiert und historisch bedingt sind, in diesem Band als zusammengehorendes, sich wechselseitig bedingendes Spannungsverhaltnis gedacht. Diese interdisziplinare Perspektive eroffnet uberraschende Einsichten in Praktiken und Strategien des (In)Stabilen, die sich insbesondere im Umschlagen von einer Kategorie in die andere offenbaren.

Reasoning for Information: Seeking and Planning Dialogues provides a logic-based reasoning component for spoken language dialogue systems. This component, called Problem Assistant is responsible for processing constraints on a possible solution obtained from various sources, namely user and the system's domain-specific information. The authors also present findings on the implementation of a dialogue management interface to the Problem Assistant. The dialogue system supports simple mixed-initiative planning interactions in the TRAINS domain, which is still a relatively complex domain involving a number of logical constraints and relations forming the basis for the collaborative problem-solving behavior that drives the dialogue.

Reasoning for Information: Seeking and Planning Dialogues provides a logic-based reasoning component for spoken language dialogue systems. This component, called Problem Assistant is responsible for processing constraints on a possible solution obtained from various sources, namely user and the system's domain-specific information. The authors also present findings on the implementation of a dialogue management interface to the Problem Assistant. The dialogue system supports simple mixed-initiative planning interactions in the TRAINS domain, which is still a relatively complex domain involving a number of logical constraints and relations forming the basis for the collaborative problem-solving behavior that drives the dialogue.