It’s official: treble damages, other goodies available in Munich patent cases; still no Texas-size awards, but nothing to sneeze at either

Context:

• The global patent remedies map appears binary:
  • In the U.S., damages awards in the hundreds of millions of dollars are reported all the time, and even billion-dollar amounts occur. But the greater the number, the less likely it is ever to be actually enforced. And the hurdle for injunctions is exceedingly high (eBay v. MercExchange).
  • In the rest of the world, the name of the patent litigation game is injunctive relief as a trigger of settlements. Damages are, at best, an afterthought.
• But smart litigation planners keep an eye on the evolving landscape:
  • An Indian court has recently awarded damages of $17.7M in an antenna case (April 1, 2026 ip fray article).
  • The Unified Patent Court (UPC) has just started the development of its damages case law (March 15, 2026 ip fray article). It is too early to tell where things will go there.
  • German patent damages law allows the recovery of infringer’s profits. Little attention has been afforded to the November 14, 2023 Polsterumarbeitungsmaschine (a typically German, unwieldy compound noun that means “upholstery alteration machine”) ruling by the German Federal Court of Justice, which allows a disgorgement of profits made even after expiration of the infringed patent, akin to the springboard theory, with respect to future sales of wearables, consumables, add-ons, and services.
  • German case law does not envision a FRAND (fair, reasonable, and non-discriminatory) cap on damages for standard-essential patent (SEP) infringement.
• When it comes to the legal analysis of patent-related economic questions (royalty levels and damages), the Munich I Regional Court’s 7th Civil Chamber is presently the most sophisticated judicial panel in (at least continental) Europe.

What’s new: The Munich I Regional Court’s 7th Civil Chamber has very recently handed down a damages judgment that comes with 16 headnotes explaining the intriguing opportunities and inevitable limitations of patent damages claims brought in that forum.

Direct impact:

• The award of approximately $1.25M plus interest — approximately half of what the plaintiff was seeking — is actually fairly high when considering the limited economic scale of the infringements at issue: 28 units of an industrial 3D printer and 266 units of a solvent used in the operation of that device.
• The defendant can appeal. Notably, the underlying merits ruling is still under appeal, which did not dissuade the court from going ahead and adjudicating the subsequent damages recovery case. This also shows that the damages quantification proceedings were concluded ahead of the merits appeal. There have been other cases in Germany where a strict sequence of exhausting all merits appeals (infringement and validity) prior to getting started with damages delayed recovery by 10 or more years.

Wider ramifications:

• Don’t leave money on the table. Three alternative damages theories (license analogy; damage to patentee’s business; disgorgement of infringer’s profits) offer distinct challenge-opportunity profiles, and some combinations of them are allowed.
• There even is a theory that allows the recovery of three times the regular royalty rate, and the standard rates from 1% to 10% for a single patent are already economically attractive in many scenarios. Many claims that easily survive a Daubert motion in U.S. litigation would not fly in Germany with a more conservative than punitive approach to damages. That said, the Munich guidance does enable the recovery of economically significant amounts, and the evidentiary hurdles appear reasonable but surmountable.
• If the requirements of BSH Hausgeräte v. Electrolux (February 25, 2025 ip fray article) are met, you can seek cross-border damages. BSH itself is all about damages, though it is now most frequently being applied to injunctions.
• Patentees can use the availability of significant patent damages awards in Munich during the course of licensing negotiations to achieve better results.
• Access to sizable damages awards is a major plus when raising litigation funding, where theories of leverage from injunctions are harder to grasp and (for non-SEPs) involve the complicated question of future designarounds.