Context:
- In June, the Unified Patent Court (UPC) received a record number of 31 new patent infringement complaints (item 10.2 of our July 19, 2025 UPC Roundup). Those new filings included a number of high-profile cases, such as SAP’s first-ever offensive patent case (July 21, 2025 ip fray article).
- Prior to June, the only major UPC case to be filed over Artificial Intelligence (AI) technologies was ParTec v. NVIDIA (January 17, 2025 ip fray article). It’s ongoing.
- The most famous AI company, OpenAI, has so far only been sued over one U.S. patent targeting its video generation feature, but the Engajer case went nowhere because the company couldn’t find a lawyer to represent it, and corporations can’t self-represent (pro se). Other than that, no patent assertion against OpenAI was known anywhere in the world before today.
What’s new: We have found out that on June 17, 2025, the UPC’s Paris Local Division (LD) received a patent infringement action brought
- by French company KeeeX (corporate website), which specializes in “verifiable files”,
- against three OpenAI entities, two Adobe entities, Truepic (“trustworthy virtual inspection”), the Coalition for Content Provenance and Authenticity (C2PA; February 18, 2024 ai fray article) and the service provider running the C2PA (Joint Development Foundation Projects LLC),
- over EP2949070 (“Verification process of the integrity of numerical data bloc”). That patent was originally obtained by a French public university (Aix-Marseille Université (AMU)) and a French public research institute (Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS)).
Direct impact:
- The patent has a 2014 priority date and will accordingly expire only in 2034. Presumably, KeeeX is seeking an injunction and damages with respect to eight UPC contracting member states (CMS): Austria, Belgium, Denmark, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, and Sweden.
- The patent is also in force in eight countries that are not UPC CMS but contracting states of the European Patent Organisation (EPOrg): Ireland, Liechtenstein, Norway, Poland, Spain, Switzerland, Turkey, and the United Kingdom. But the list of defendants, as seen on the UPC’s website, lacks an anchor defendant over which the Paris LD would have jurisdiction for BSH long-arm purposes. Otherwise KeeeX could try to seek remedies with respect to 16 countries.
Wider ramifications:
- There is no FRAND (fair, reasonable and non-discriminatory licensing) issue in this case. The C2PA was formed long after the patent’s filing date, and neither KeeeX nor the organizations that filed the application are among the members. The C2PA has an open web royalty-free approach to IP, which doesn’t bind others.
- So far, the category of intellectual property that OpenAI is primarily dealing with is copyright (e.g., July 18, 2025 LinkedIn post by ai fray). But patents could play an ever bigger role.
- We will explain this case on ai fray in order to help members of the AI and wider tech ecosystems understand its significance, given that they will not (yet) be too familiar with the UPC and its proceedings.
Normally the UPC tries to take such cases to trial within about a year.
The language choice made by the plaintiff, French, would be unlikely to survive a motion by those defendants from English-speaking countries to switch to the language of the patent, but the patent was filed in French.
The defendants will likely argue that an injunction against the prevention of (deep)fake news is against the public interest, particularly with a view to the potential manipulation of political elections, but public-interest arguments have thus far not had significant traction in the UPC.
Claim language
We don’t know which claim(s) KeeeX is asserting, but here’s the language of claim 1:
Method for verifying the integrity of a block of digital data, the method comprising the steps of:
- searching, in a first data block (4), for a digital identification fingerprint of the first data block (4), by means of a first marker (7), if the identification fingerprint (2) of the first data block is found in the first data block,
- calculating a digital fingerprint of the first data block by applying a fingerprint calculation function to the first data block, the calculated fingerprint of the first data block having a value dependent on each of the bits of the first data block excluding the bits of the identification fingerprint (2) found in the first data block, and
- verifying the identification fingerprint found in the first data block by comparing it with the calculated fingerprint of the first data block, a false comparison revealing that the first data block has changed since the identification fingerprint was inserted into the first data block, or that the identification fingerprint was calculated by applying a different fingerprint calculation function to the first data block.
This is functionally not limited to content authenticity mechanisms, but may read on implementations of the C2PA standard, in which case there would be no shortage of other defendants KeeeX could sue as well.
Court and counsel
Panel: Presiding Judge Camille Lignieres, Judge Carine Gillet and Judge Professor Peter Tochtermann (Mannheim, Germany).
Counsel for KeeeX: Fidal Avocats (counsel of record: Thibaud Lelong).