2025-07-31 - Court of - TEXPORT Handelsgesellschaft v. Sioen - UPC_CFI_9/2024
- Aktenzeichen:
- UPC_CFI_9/2024
- Datum:
- Spruchkörper:
- Court of First Instance - Nordic Baltic Regional Division
- Art:
- Proceeding Decision
- Parteien:
- TEXPORT Handelsgesellschaft mbH v. Sioen NV
Kernaussage: The Nordic-Baltic Regional Division granted an exclusive licensee the full merits remedy set and used the decision to set out where the choice of substantive law and the limitation of damages actually bite.
2025-07-31 - Court of - TEXPORT Handelsgesellschaft
v.
Sioen - UPC_CFI_9/2024
notable
The Nordic-Baltic Regional Division granted an exclusive licensee the full merits remedy set and used the decision to set out where the choice of substantive law and the limitation of damages actually bite. On applicable law it recorded the divergence between the Court of Appeal in UPC_CoA_30/2024, which treats the UPCA as supplying a complete set of substantive rules, and the Mannheim Local Division in UPC_CFI_159/2024, which applies national substantive law to acts completed before 1 June 2023, and held that the two approaches usually converge because a party invoking national law must itself set out how that law differs; Sioen had not, so Portuguese law was presumed to correspond to the UPCA. On limitation it surveyed the divergent national absolute periods and the knowledge-based period of Art. 72 UPCA, observed that claims already time-barred under national law before the UPCA entered into force cannot be revived, and deferred the question to the damages proceedings. On standing it held that a written confirmation from the patent proprietor, who was also the licensee's managing director, sufficed under Art. 47(2) UPCA and that registration in the national registers is irrelevant. The injunction covers every Contracting Member State except Romania and Malta; the ongoing Belgian proceedings do not involve the same parties and so do not bar an injunction covering Belgium, and the public's need for firefighter suits is not a proportionality ground. The Art. 67 UPCA information order was granted in substance by way of a signed independent-auditor statement, and the division expressly refused to limit its time span up front because only after the information is rendered will the claimant know whether national rules matter.