2026-10-20 - LD Mannheim - Huawei v. HMD Global - UPC_CFI_481/2025

1. In the absence of any pointer to the opposite, it must be assumed that a feature in a patent claim has a technical significance within the teaching of the claim and contributes to the teaching and its technical effect. 2. When assessing the disclosure content of an (priority) application, hindsight must be avoided. It is not sufficient that the skilled person having the granted patent claim in mind might recognize elements of the granted patent claim in the priority application and assign them accordingly to features of the granted patent. On the contrary, the subject-matter of the granted patent claim must be directly and unambiguously apparent from the content of the priority application, without prior knowledge of the granted patent claim.

The Mannheim LD revoked the SEP to the extent attacked and dismissed the infringement action, without reaching the FRAND defence. The decisive ground was an invalid priority claim: applying the Art. 123(2) EPC gold-standard disclosure test to the priority application under Art. 87 EPC, the Court held that a feature requiring time unit format information relating to a configuration period was not directly and unambiguously disclosed, so the patent was entitled only to its filing date and was anticipated by an intervening version of the 3GPP standard. The Court stressed that the priority test must be applied without hindsight: it is not enough that a reader who knows the granted claim can map passages of the priority document onto its features. In claim construction it presumed that every claim feature has technical significance unless something points to the contrary, and it held that a patentee asserting that a term had a well-known meaning at the priority date bears a secondary burden to substantiate the source of that meaning. None of the auxiliary requests or separately defended dependent claims restored priority, and the patentee offered no novelty defence against the intervening standard for any limited version.