Tilman Pfrang, LL.M. | 14th April 2026
Recent decisions and orders address the limits of UPC long-arm jurisdiction, the UPC’s first referral to the CJEU, fee consequences of staggered counterclaims for revocation, and the continued restrictive approach to additional written submissions in appeal proceedings. The Court of Appeal in particular further sharpened the procedural contours of appeal proceedings and clarified important aspects of the UPC’s international jurisdiction under Brussels I Recast.
Court of Appeal (UPC_CoA_678/2025, Order of 4 March 2026; UPC_CoA_884/2025, Order of 27 February 2026)
In Hurom v NUC Electronics and Sibio Technology v Abbott Diabetes Care, the Court of Appeal again confirmed that the written phase of appeal proceedings is intentionally narrow and that additional written rounds under Rule 36 RoP remain exceptional. In Hurom, the appellant had filed two new auxiliary requests with its statement of grounds of appeal. In response, NUC challenged their admissibility and also attacked them for lack of inventive step based on two newly cited prior-art documents. Hurom sought leave to file a further written submission, but the Court rejected the request. It held that NUC’s arguments were a legitimate response to requests first introduced by Hurom on appeal and that the new inventive-step attacks could not have been raised earlier for that very reason. In Sibio, the Court rejected a similar request for an additional written round where Abbott had relied in its response on six auxiliary requests that had already been filed and admitted at first instance, but had not been addressed in the first-instance decision because the patent had been upheld as granted. The judge-rapporteur held that such auxiliary requests automatically remain part of the appeal proceedings unless withdrawn; there is no need to re-file them on appeal. Their continued reliance therefore did not amount to a cross-appeal and did not justify further written pleadings.
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Local Division Mannheim (CFI_344/2025; CFI_735/2025; PR-UPC-CFI-0000639/2026, Order of 27 February 2026)
In Irdeto v SZ DJI Technology and others, the Mannheim Local Division clarified the application of Rule 370.7 RoP to court fees for counterclaims for revocation where several defendants are served at different times. The Court confirmed that where multiple defendants jointly file a single counterclaim for revocation, only one fee is payable. It distinguished that situation from the case of a later-served defendant filing its own counterclaim at a later stage, even if that counterclaim is identical in content to the one already filed by co-defendants. In the case at hand, defendants 2 to 4 had jointly filed a counterclaim and paid the corresponding fee in August 2025. Defendant 1, however, had only been served later and filed its own defence and counterclaim in February 2026. The Court held that this later filing constituted a separate counterclaim for fee purposes and therefore required a separate fee. It ordered defendant 1 to pay within 14 days and expressly referred to the possibility of a default decision under Rule 355 RoP if payment was not made in time.
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Court of Appeal (UPC_CoA_789/2025; UPC_CoA_813/2025, Orders of 6 March 2026)
In Dyson v Dreame International and others, the Court of Appeal issued the UPC’s first referral to the CJEU. The appeals arose from a preliminary injunction granted by the Hamburg Local Division in proceedings concerning Dyson’s EP 3 119 235. The Court of Appeal confirmed and extended the preliminary injunction within UPC territory, including to additional product variants introduced after the first-instance decision, but stayed the parts of the appeal concerning Spain and the claims against an alleged authorised representative. It referred four questions to the CJEU concerning the limits of the UPC’s international jurisdiction and the concept of an intermediary. The questions focus, first, on whether Art. 8(1) in conjunction with Art. 71b(2) Brussels I Recast can support jurisdiction over a non-EU defendant for alleged infringement in a non-UPC EU state where the co-defendant in a UPC state is merely alleged to be an intermediary. Secondly, they concern whether Art. 71b(2), second sentence, permits cross-border provisional measures against a non-EU defendant extending beyond UPC territory to a non-UPC EU state, particularly where the same products are marketed across Europe through largely identical websites. Thirdly, the Court asked whether the use of a service provider or intermediary established in UPC territory is relevant to that jurisdictional analysis. Fourthly, it asked whether Union law permits an injunction against an authorised representative performing regulatory compliance functions under EU product legislation.
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Court of Appeal (UPC_CoA_922/2025; UPC_CoA_923/2025; UPC_CoA_924/2025; UPC_CoA_925/2025, Order of 13 March 2026)
In Keeex v Adobe, OpenAI and others, the Court of Appeal clarified that UPC jurisdiction based on Art. 7(2) Brussels I Recast is territorially limited to UPC territory and does not extend to alleged infringement in non-UPC states. The Paris Local Division had accepted jurisdiction not only for UPC territories but also for the Swiss, Spanish, British, Irish, Norwegian and Polish parts of the patent. The Court of Appeal set that aside. Referring to CJEU case law such as Fiona Shevill and Pez Hejduk, it held that jurisdiction based on the place where the harmful event occurred allows a court to rule only on damage occurring within the territory linked to that connecting factor. It rejected the view that BSH v Electrolux justified a broader reach irrespective of whether jurisdiction was based on Art. 4 or Art. 7(2) Brussels I Recast. The Court also addressed Art. 71b(3) Brussels I Recast, explaining that this provision may only become relevant if the UPC already has jurisdiction for infringement within UPC territory and that it requires, inter alia, sufficiently connected assets of the defendant in a UPC Member State. Because Keeex had failed to plead the necessary factual basis in its statement of claim, the Court left open whether Art. 71b(3) could in principle justify jurisdiction for non-UPC territories. More generally, the order stresses that claimants must substantiate the Court’s international jurisdiction already in the statement of claim under Rule 13.1(i) RoP and may not cure such deficiencies only later in response to objections. The Court also confirmed that national jurisdiction provisions, such as Art. 14 of the French Civil Code, have no role before the UPC.
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The Hague Local Division (UPC_CFI_616/2025; UPC_CFI_1439/2025, Procedural Order of 18 February 2026)
In GlaxoSmithKline Biologicals v Moderna, the Hague Local Division dealt with three procedural issues in a pharmaceutical dispute. First, it granted GSK leave under Rule 263 RoP to amend its infringement case to expressly include Moderna’s updated vaccine product mNEXSPIKE, although it noted that such an amendment was not strictly necessary because, following the Court of Appeal’s guidance in Abbott v Sibio, an injunction request need not be confined to a closed list of named products and may already cover later variants. Secondly, it addressed GSK’s 40 conditional auxiliary requests filed with its Rule 30.1 RoP amendment application. The Court was not convinced, at that stage, that 40 auxiliary requests introducing at least 18 new features were necessarily “reasonable”, but instead of striking them or imposing a numerical cap, it ordered GSK to file a comprehensive table mapping each auxiliary request to the invalidity attacks it was intended to address. Thirdly, it dismissed Moderna’s Rule 9 RoP application seeking to strike allegedly late-filed evidence and claim-construction and infringement argumentation. The Court held that the contested material was, in substance, a permissible response to Moderna’s pleaded non-infringement and claim-construction defences and that excluding it would interfere with GSK’s right to be heard, especially given the availability of a further written round and the oral hearing.
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