There is an interesting parallel between the UK-related reasoning in this new decision and what the CoA said at last week’s long-arm hearing.
Context: The dispute between Dyson and Dreame over hairstyling devices has already led to the Unified Patent Court’s (UPC) first-ever preliminary reference to the European Court of Justice (ECJ) (March 6, 2026 ip fray article). The UPC’s Court of Appeal (CoA) furthermore addressed some questions related to the relevance of file-wrapper arguments (March 11, 2026 ip fray article). At the level of the Court of First Instance (CFI), the dispute also gave rise to the UPC’s first-ever Spanish injunction (August 18, 2025 ip fray article).
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Headnotes
- The UPC is considered to be a [member state court] just like the national EU Member State courts (Art. 71a BR), with a territory encompassing all Contracting Member States. Hence, the UPC has international jurisdiction under Art. 4 BR for every defendant[] who is based or domiciled within any Contracting Member State of the UPCA.
- Legal requirements that are not designed to ensure a certain level of protection within the UK, or at least Northern Ireland as a part of the UK, but to protect from an abstract risk in case the goods end up in the EU, are not a reasonably foreseeable basis to open jurisdiction based on the principle of co-defendants under Art. 8 [Brussels Regulation].
- The fact[] that a party is the Authorized Representative for a non-EU based manufacturer in Northern Ireland[] is – as far as the evidence shows – not a sufficient basis for qualifying this party being a joint tortfeasor with the actual importer or an intermediary in the meaning of the English law (cf. Art. 62 and 63 (1) UPCA).
- As pursuant to Art. 1 (2) and (3) of the Guidelines, the ceilings on recoverable costs apply to the costs of representation at each instance of the proceedings, irrespective of the number of parties, it follows that in a split cost decision according to Art. 69(2) UPCA the costs should be split proportionally, not per party.
Court and counsel
Panel: Presiding Judge Sabine Klepsch, Judge-rapporteur Dr. Stefan Schilling, and Judge Stefan Johansson (Stockholm, Sweden; Presiding Judge, Nordic-Baltic Regional Division).
Counsel for Dyson: DLA Piper’s Dr. Constanze Krenz.
Counsel for Dreame: Hogan Lovells’s Christian Stoll.
- As the table in our article on the preliminary reference to the ECJ showed, three of the four questions referred are specifically about scenarios in which the proposed anchor defendant is an authorized product representative. Only one of the four questions is unrelated to that question as it does not involve an intermediary of any kind. ↩︎