2026-01-16 - LD Paris - Mul-T-Lock France et al. v. IMC Créations et al. - UPC_CFI_702/2024 and UPC_CFI_369/2025

FRENCH: 1. Le brevet européen devenu unitaire et modifié de manière inconditionnelle, prend effet à la date de délivrance du brevet européen. 2. La contrefaçon de la part nationale du brevet européen délivré par un Etat hors JUB, doit être appréciée au regard du brevet tel que délivré initialement. Le brevet en litige présente un risque non négligeable d’annulation, par les juridictions de l’Etat de délivrance, après modification inconditionnelle du brevet unitaire. 3. La personne du métier n’est qu’un simple exécutant. Un document non accessible au public n’appartient pas aux connaissances générales communes. ENGLISH: 1. The European patent that has become unitary and has been modified unconditionally takes effect on the date of grant of the European patent. 2. Infringement of the national part of the European patent granted by a State outside the UPC must be assessed in relation to the patent as initially granted. This patent presents a significant risk of annulment by the courts of the State of grant after unconditional modification of the Unitary Patent. 3. The person skilled in the art is merely an executor. A document that is not accessible to the public does not belong to the common general knowledge.

The Paris Local Division decided a unitary-patent infringement action alongside a revocation counterclaim and produced three headnotes. First, a European patent that has become unitary and has been unconditionally amended takes effect at the date of grant of the European patent, so the limitation operates retroactively to 1 November 2023 and the defendant cannot escape liability by saying that the granted claims were manifestly invalid before the limitation or that it did not know it was infringing under Art. 68(4) UPCA. Second, infringement of the national part of a European patent granted by a non-UPCA state must be assessed against the patent as initially granted; following BSH v Electrolux the Court has no jurisdiction over the validity of such a part but does have jurisdiction over its infringement, unless there is a reasonable and non-negligible risk that the patent will be annulled in the granting state, in which case it must stay the proceedings. Because the proprietor limited the unitary patent to escape the inventive-step attack, that risk existed for the Swiss part, and with no Swiss nullity action pending the division could neither assess infringement nor stay, so all Swiss claims were dismissed. Third, the person skilled in the art is a mere executor, and a document not accessible to the public — here an internal industrial drawing, and a padlock whose internal mechanism could be seen only by dismantling it — does not belong to the common general knowledge. On remedies the division granted the full Art. 67(1) UPCA information limb but placed it in a confidentiality club under R. 262A.6 RoP with at least one natural person per party, refusing both to limit access to the representatives alone and to end the confidentiality after three months.