2025-12-18 - LD Mannheim - Polidoro et al. v. Bekaert et al. - UPC_CFI_716/2024 and UPC_CFI_205/2025

The Mannheim Local Division upheld a burner patent against every ground of a revocation counterclaim and found one of two attacked embodiments to infringe, on a construction that reads a functional feature as requiring the function and not a level of performance. The claim requires the perforated disk to perform the internal distributor's function of guiding and distributing the mixture across the whole burner surface; it does not require any particular flame pattern or efficiency, because a quality of performance is not reflected in the claim. Read that way the feature is not superfluous beside the neighbouring features, and the embodiment whose disk shifts the entry point well above the disk level retains an internal distributor and falls outside the claim, whatever else it does. On validity the panel reached the same conclusions as the EPO Board of Appeal in the parallel opposition, held that the priority claim is valid for the independent claim even though two dependent claims have no basis in the priority document, and refused every obviousness attack as hindsight: no starting point gave the skilled person a reason to focus on making the disk and the flange from a single piece. Information and accounting were ordered in full under Art. 67(1) with Art. 68(3) UPCA and Rule 191 RoP, and the panel fixed an eight-week compliance period. Publication under Art. 80 UPCA, the mutual interim awards on costs and enforcement security were all refused for want of substantiation.