2026-04-29 - LD Helsinki - Aim Sport Development v. TGI Sport - UPC_CFI_214/2023

ENGLISH: 1. When assessing an issue where there is no Court of Appeal case law, such as equivalence, and where both parties have argued based on the same Court of First Instance case law, legal certainty and/or the right of defence guides the local division to adopt a similar approach unless there are reasons that require diverging from it. 2. In order to assess the infringement by equivalence, the criteria set up by the Court of First Instance are cumulative. If any one of the criteria is not met, there is no need to assess the other criteria. 3. If a party presents an allegation, the Court will have to respond to this allegation only in so far as the party has presented substantiated arguments.

The Helsinki LD held that EP 3 295 663 (digital overlay of moving advertising on LED billboards) is valid but not infringed by TGI's SVB System. On validity, the Court rejected TGI's added-matter, novelty and inventive-step attacks, finding that feature 12.5 — detection of an occluding object based on an image property describing an intrinsic characteristic of that object — is neither implicitly disclosed nor obvious from Rantalainen, Nevatie or Gupta, because all three teach detection of the billboard rather than of the occluding object (a paradigm shift). On infringement, the Court held that the SVB System relies on an artificial billboard signature (IR1 > T1 and IR1/IR2 > T3) and so does not literally satisfy feature 12.5; on equivalence, the Court — absent CoA case law — adopted the four-step test from LD The Hague (UPC_CFI_239/2023) on legal-certainty grounds, held the criteria cumulative, and dismissed equivalence at the technical-equivalence prong without reaching the others. The judgment also articulates a substantiation rule: a court must respond to a party's allegation only insofar as the party has presented substantiated arguments (added-matter analysis confined to claim 5 alone, the only feature TGI substantiated).