2025-10-10 - LD The Hague - Black Sheep Retail Products v. Hl Display - UPC_CFI_610/2024
- Aktenzeichen:
- UPC_CFI_610/2024
- Datum:
- Spruchkörper:
- Court of First Instance - The Hague (NL) Local Division
- Art:
- Decision
- Parteien:
- Black Sheep Retail Products B.V. v. HL Display AB
Kernaussage: The Hague Local Division held a shelf-fitting patent valid and infringed, and gave two rulings of general reach.
2025-10-10 - LD The Hague - Black Sheep Retail Products
v.
Hl Display - UPC_CFI_610/2024
landmark
The Hague Local Division held a shelf-fitting patent valid and infringed, and gave two rulings of general reach. The first is on long-arm jurisdiction: the defendant did not contest competence for the non-UPC states in which the patent is in force, and confined its revocation counterclaim to the Contracting Member States, treating invalidity elsewhere as a defence. On that footing the Court took competence for the infringement claims in every designated state, applied the BSH/Electrolux allocation — for non-UPC EU and Lugano states it asks whether there is a serious, non-negligible chance the national court will invalidate, and for non-EU states it may decide validity inter partes — and issued a single injunction for all territories where the patent is in force. The second is on the counterclaim for a declaration of non-infringement: the conditions of R. 61.1 RoP must be met at the launch of the counterclaim, an assertion of infringement cannot be inferred from the patent having been invoked against a different product, and the counterclaim itself cannot serve as the written application whose thirty days of silence then opens the door, because that would defeat the very purpose of the rule and make both its limbs redundant. On the merits, every intermediate-generalisation attack failed for want of a structural or functional link between the omitted feature and the claim, and the Court held in the alternative that a differently located protrusion would infringe by equivalence.
Nichtigkeitsgründe
Art. 138 EPCInventive Step
Patent survived (this ground)Art. 56 EPC · Art. 138(1)(a) EPC
“On the problem-solution approach both sides applied, the distinguishing features supply a technical effect — the accessory is more securely fixed while release and repositioning stay simple — so the objective problem is not the provision of a mere alternative. No prior art teaches making the one distance smaller than the other or the specific locking arrangement, and the defendant showed no hint pointing to it and could not explain why the skilled person would make the modification. The teaching of a single patent publication is not common general knowledge [10.2.4], [10.2.9]-[10.2.13].”
Added Matter
Patent survived (this ground)Art. 123(2) EPC · Art. 138(1)(c) EPC
“Four intermediate-generalisation attacks failed — the friction member, the free rear end of the second arm, the location of the first stop face and the magnetic fixation. The application describes the friction member and the magnetic fixation as optional and gives several positions for the friction member, so no inextricable link to the claimed features exists, and the counterclaimant carries the burden of showing one. The first stop face came from an original claim [10.1.1]-[10.1.16].”