Legal issues

Cross-cutting view of legal principles, recurring arguments, and the prior art the court relies on.

Filtering to principle: doctrine of equivalents: fair protection balanced against legal certainty for third parties

Most-litigated legal principles

Recurring legal principles across 1 cases with reasoning extracted. Success rate counts patentee-favorable outcomes only.

Principle	Cases	Decided	Patentee success
doctrine of equivalents: fair protection balanced against legal certainty for third parties	1	1	0%
equivalence rejected where alternative design has an independent technical function of its own, not merely a work-around	1	1	0%
patents representing modest inventive contribution do not demand broad equivalence scope	1	1	0%
equivalence arguments first raised in reply are admissible where they respond to defence arguments and relate to the same features	1	1	0%
counterclaim for revocation dismissed where both patents found valid	1	1	0%

Most-rejected arguments

Arguments that the UPC has not accepted, ranked by repeat occurrences across cases.

Argument	Party	Cases
literal infringement of claim features 1(d)(iii), 1(h), 1(j) and 1(k)(iii) of ep 1 910 572 by hcr products	Claimant	1
infringement by equivalence for the missing 'non-overlapping' feature 1(h)	Claimant	1

Most-cited prior art

References relied on across substantive merits cases, with the role they typically play.

Reference	Predominant role	Cases
WO 2007/001986 A2 (WO986) — EP572 priority document	Background	1