2026 Week 4
The extent of the jurisdiction asserted by the UPC is a hot topic at the moment. On 22 January 2026, the UPC Court of Appeal (CoA) held the oral hearing in the appeal against the preliminary injunction order in Dyson v. Dreame, reviewed in UPC Weekly 2025 w34. That case has some juicy jurisdictional elements, in particular how and whether non-EU defendants can be sued at the UPC for infringing acts outside the UPC territory. We will report on the CoA decision in due course.
In the meantime, IMC Créations v. Mul-T-Lock France is a 16 January 2026 decision on infringement and validity from the UPC Paris Local Division (LD). The technology is mechanical, but the most interesting aspects of the case relate to the limits of long arm jurisdiction and the effect of amendment of the patent on claims for damages.
Jurisdiction
EP 4153830 B1 defines a lock that can be used on a sliding door of a panel van, for example. The patent proprietor’s product corresponds to the first embodiment in the patent. The defendant’s alleged infringing product is called the MVP 1000. In prosecution, the international search revealed only A citations. The patent was granted in November 2023 with the claims as filed and was registered as a unitary patent and also validated in Spain, Switzerland and UK.
In November 2024, IMC launched patent infringement proceedings at the Paris LD against two defendants, Mul-T-Lock France and Mul-T-Lock Suisse. They claimed infringement of the unitary patent and of the Swiss, Spanish and UK parts of the European patent.
Mul-T-Lock filed a preliminary objection, challenging the UPC’s jurisdiction to decide on infringement outside the UPC states. The Paris LD issued its order on the preliminary objection in March 2025.
IMC withdrew the part of its action against Mul-T-Lock Suisse, because it turned out that this was just a branch office of Mul-T-Lock France. IMC asked the court to assert its jurisdiction in respect of the UPC states and also Switzerland (so apparently abandoning UK and Spain).
Following the CJEU ruling in BSH v. Electrolux, the Paris LD explained that it would have jurisdiction to hear the infringement case in respect of Spain, Switzerland and the UK. Invalidity defences would be assessed slightly differently by the UPC between these different countries, but as it happened, there were no national invalidity actions started in those countries.
Validity
Mul-T-Lock filed a counterclaim for revocation, citing various documents as prior art. They also set out various further disclosures as being representative of the common general knowledge, but some of these were dismissed by the court either on the grounds of not being proven to be widely known, or otherwise due to being non-public disclosures.
In reply, IMC decided to amend the claims of the patent. In EPO-speak, they filed amended claims as their main request. They also filed auxiliary requests, but these were not needed in the end. But when litigating a European patent at the UPC, claim amendments can only have effect with respect to the territory of the UPC. So, the claim amendments only affected the unitary patent.
The claims of the main request were novel and so the court considered inventive step using the UPC CoA approach. As usual, a key issue is the definition of the objective problem. The court dismissed both parties’ suggestions on this topic as containing pointers to the solution. The court’s own formulation was more generic, but required three aspects of improvement over the prior art.
The court decided that the amended claims were inventive. For each combination of prior art documents, there was no incentive/motivation for the skilled person to make the required change to the starting point document, or there was “teaching away”, or the asserted document combinations simply would not fall inside the scope of the amended claims.
The invention is a mechanical one, but relatively subtle in terms of the differences over the prior art and their effects. Although we could go through all the technical analysis here (and I did consider doing that!) it is probably better to consider the outcome in the round. Having decided not to admit certain evidence as common general knowledge, the court’s decision that amended claim 1 is inventive seems fair.
Infringement
The court moved on to whether it should consider infringement of the Swiss part of the patent. The defendant argued that, by presenting amended claims as their main request for the unitary patent, the patentee was tacitly admitting that the claims as granted were obvious. The court agreed. With the significant risk of invalidity of the Swiss part of the patent, the court declined to assess infringement in Switzerland.
What about infringement of the amended claims of the unitary patent? There was one feature of the claims that was disputed. Although the parties agreed that the alleged infringement would work slightly less well than the embodiment in the patent (in terms of allowing a little more space for potential insertion of a vandalism tool), the court decided that there was infringement on the basis of a normal interpretation of the claims and without needing to resort to a consideration of equivalence.
The outcome on validity and infringement was therefore that it was possible for the patentee to show an amended form for the claims that was valid and infringed. Presumably the same amendments would have been allowable in Switzerland and would have led to the Swiss part of the patent being valid and infringed. But because the amendments were not made there, the court would not be drawn into considering infringement of such a scope of claim for Switzerland.
Any further defence to infringement?
Mul-T-Lock complained that the patent as granted had been invalid and was only amended during the course of the UPC proceedings. Therefore they asserted that they should not be held liable for infringement of the patent between the date of grant and the date of amendment of the patent.
The court had no truck with this. The amendments to the patent are deemed to take effect from the date of grant of the patent. Although the granted patent may have been invalid, the onus would be on the defendant to take action to clear the way, rather than relying on a private assertion that the patent was invalid.
The court therefore granted IMC an injunction, but limited to the UPC states and so not extending to Switzerland. IMC have their declaration that Mul-T-Lock is also liable for damages, but these are to be assessed in separate proceedings.
A 90% win?
On costs, the court decided that Mul-T-Lock should bear 90% of the costs and IMC should bear 10%. This is interesting apportionment, given that the counterclaim for revocation clearly resulted in IMC deciding to file amended claims as their main request, and given the failure of the action in respect of Switzerland, and the withdrawal of the action in respect of other countries.
One interesting question is whether IMC could have filed a request for central limitation of the patent at the EPO, and whether this would have been decided in time for the amended claims to take effect both at the UPC and in Switzerland. This would have dealt with the court’s concern about validity of the Swiss part of the patent and presumably opened up a wider injunction and potentially a broader damages claim.
