2026-02-11 - LD Düsseldorf - Katun et al. v. Katun et al. - UPC_CFI_351/2024, UPC_CFI_595/2024

ENGLISH: If a defendant has used its own website to create the impression that there has been no patent infringement, it may be justified under Art. 80 UPCA to not only allow the claimant to publish the Court’s decision, but also to require the defendant to publish the operative part of the decision on its website.

The Düsseldorf Local Division upheld a unitary patent on a printer-consumable container against a revocation counterclaim and found all four defendants in the supply chain to infringe, the foreign manufacturer as an accomplice because it knew of and intended the distribution in UPC territory. Claim construction turned on whether the claim covers a container or a system: the Court held that naming the apparatus the container is mountable to does not make the apparatus a claimed element, so the container need only be suitable for such mounting — which disposed of the sole infringement defence and made the auxiliary indirect-infringement case unnecessary. On added matter the decision is a practical guide to attacking a translation: a party that disputes the published English text of a Japanese PCT application must identify specific translation errors and support them, for instance by a party-expert report on the particularities of the language, and cannot do so by tendering a rival translation of a single claim. The headnote is on publication: where a defendant has used its own website to create the impression that there has been no infringement, Art. 80 UPCA justifies not only allowing the claimant to publish but ordering the defendant to publish the operative part on that website — here for one month, alongside publication by the claimant in five industry journals. Enforcement security was refused on the same reasoning the division has used before: the R. 158 RoP factors, with the defendant pleading first.