Context:
- Yesterday (March 30, 2026), ip fray was the only media outlet (and only one of two non-parties, the other being a UK lawyer) to attend the Unified Patent Court’s (UPC) Court of Appeal’s (CoA) Fujifilm v. Kodak hearing. We shared the CoA’s preliminary views near-instantaneously1 via LinkedIn:
- Fujifilm may win a reversal of the case it lost in Mannheim, potentially resulting in two injunctions instead of one. The invalidation of independent claims will not automatically invalidate their dependent claims to the extent that an explicit auxiliary request to turn dependent claims into independent ones would have to be brought. This is not a long-arm issue, and we will discuss it again when the ruling comes down.2
- The UPC has jurisdiction over patent-infringing acts committed in the UK by a defendant domiciled in UPCland. But there are certain pleading and evidentiary requirements in each case.
- A subsequent LinkedIn post discussed the state of play for long-arm in the UPC based on what we heard yesterday as compared to
- the preliminary reference in Dyson v. Dreame (March 6, 2026 ip fray article) and
- the reversal of the denial of a preliminary objection (PO) by OpenAI, Adobe and others (March 13, 2026 ip fray article).
- There was another long-arm-related CoA decision this month. Contrary to what has been written somewhere else, it is simply not true that Hurom’s (cross-)appeal against NUC regarding jurisdiction with a view to Turkey was “also dismissed” as a result of (“[w]ith”) the CoA reversing the liability ruling in the main appeal. The cross-appeal of the Mannheim Local Division’s (LD) finding that long-arm jurisdiction regarding Turkey had not been established was not automatically baseless.3 For practitioners, that decision also contained valuable guidance on the latest point at which to raise a jurisdictional objection and even on substance if one reads the CoA decision in light of the affirmed part of the Mannheim ruling.4
Further reporting and analysis
UPC “must” exercise long-arm jurisdiction when called upon
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Court and counsel
CoA (panel 2): Presiding Judge Rian Kalden, Judge Ingeborg Simonsson, Judge Dr. Patricia Rombach, Technically Qualified Judge Max Tilmann, and Technically Qualified Judge Lorenzo Parrini.
Counsel for plaintiff Fujifilm: Kather Augenstein’s Dr. Christof Augenstein.
Counsel for defendant Kodak: Freshfields’s Wolrad Prinz zu Waldeck und Pyrmont and Dr. Nina Bayerl.
- This, of course, does not amount to “streaming” or a live transcript. We don’t record or broadcast, which would be against the rules. It was just about a few key pieces of information that we shared (not even verbatim quotes in this case). ↩︎
- The presiding judge indicated that it may take some time to adjudicate this set of appeals (multiple case numbers). ↩︎
- The UPC can revoke a patent erga omnes only with respect to its own contracting member states. Therefore, even if it revokes it for countries like Germany, the Turkish part of the patent formally remains alive. Of course, it borders on the inconceivable that the UPC could ever be persuaded of the Turkish part of a European patent, with Turkey being a European Patent Convention (EPC) contracting state and therefore sharing many of the same patent rules, should be considered valid despite other national parts of the same European patent having been revoked. But formally an infringement claim relating to a country that is not a UPC CMS requires a technical decision and does not automatically go away as if the asserted patent claims had disappeared. In the case at hand, the CoA did not reach the technical merits but affirmed the Mannheim LD’s grant of the (non-preliminary) objection to jurisdiction. And in doing so, it provided valuable clarifications that our subscribers learned about last week. ↩︎
- The most valuable type of CoA ruling on an issue is one where specific positions are taken by the appellate panel and explained in detail. Ideally, they would even address key questions in headnotes. That was the case here with respect to the timing of an objection, and two of the three headnotes actually reference the Brussels Regulation. But even an appellate holding that there is no obvious error in the decision below has significant relevance. The decision below can be cited with the additional note that it was affirmed by the appeals court without a detailed reasoning, giving it yet more weight than if the appeals court had not looked into the question at all. ↩︎