2026-05-29 - LD Paris - Tiru v. Maguin et al. - UPC_CFI_130/2025

The Paris Local Division dismissed TIRU's infringement action against the operator and the manufacturer of a waste-incineration furnace, on a patent the Paris Central Division had maintained in amended form. Two independent grounds carry the dismissal. First, a claim term the validity decision had left open — a secondary part of the envelope 'arranged downstream of' the primary part — was construed on the ordinary meaning of the words as requiring the two parts to sit one after the other without overlap; in the accused furnace the primary part overlaps the secondary one entirely, so that feature was plainly not reproduced. Second, infringement must be assessed consistently with validity: because the patentee, defending validity, had argued that a functionally-defined 'cooling air' could not be presumed present in prior art absent a clear and unambiguous disclosure, it bore the burden of proving to the same standard that the accused furnace's secondary air actually performed that cooling function, and it did not discharge it. Equivalence failed on the first prong of the four-step test the parties agreed and the Court adopted from the Hague Local Division: technical equivalence is the minimum necessary condition, and the function said to be equivalent was the very function left unproven. The Court also held it had competence under Art. 32(1)(a) UPCA over an abuse-of-rights counterclaim as a related defence but rejected it, upheld the saisie expert's report against an impartiality challenge, and applied a single recoverable-costs ceiling shared between the two defendants.