2025-03-11 - LD Mannheim - Hurom v. NUC Electronics et al. - UPC_CFI_159/2024

Was ist diese UPC-Entscheidung?

Zusammenfassung: The Mannheim Local Division decided which substantive law governs an infringement of a traditional European bundle patent across the entry into force of the UPCA, and gave five headnotes on it. The question is strictly separate from jurisdiction. Acts committed after 1 June 2023 are governed by the substantive law of the UPCA, because Art. 25 to 28 UPCA speak of a 'patent' without distinguishing bundle patents from unitary patents, and Art. 149a EPC leaves a group of contracting states free to harmonise their national law that far. Acts committed and concluded before that date are governed by national law, because Art. 28 of the Vienna Convention and the Union-law principles on retroactivity forbid applying the new regime to facts lying wholly in the past. Acts begun before and continued after are governed by the UPCA, assessed not formalistically but by asking whether the infringer could have stopped and chose to go on; either party may still invoke a more favourable national rule for the earlier period, and must then set that rule out itself, because it is not for the Court to research the national laws of its member states of its own motion. Headnote 5 separates the intertemporal applicability of the right to information from the period it covers: the Art. 67 and Art. 68(3) UPCA rights reach back before 1 June 2023, and the operative part is not to be trimmed in time up front.

Quelle und Fundstellen

Quelle: UPC Case File

Aktenzeichen: UPC_CFI_159/2024