Posts in Europe

Today, the European Union Intellectual Property Office (EUIPO) published a study exploring challenges faced by EU small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) in obtaining financing by offering intellectual property (IP) as collateral. Set against the backdrop of the EU’s recently launched Savings and Investment Union (SIU) program, the EUIPO’s study identifies several structural barriers preventing SMEs from obtaining IP-backed financing and concludes with a series of policy recommendations designed to address the SME credit gap and unlock tremendous economic value for the wider EU market.

The U.S. Chamber of Commerce’s Global Innovation Policy Center (GIPC) today released its 2026 International IP Index, which flagged concerning trends about the “growing erosion of IP leadership” among the world’s high-performing economies, according to the report’s authors. In particular, the report noted that scores in eight EU Member States have declined this year, although the top ten rankings remained the same from 2025. The United States was again number one, with a relatively stable score of 95.15% compared with last year’s 95.17%.

A British consumers’ organization has withdrawn its competition claim against Qualcomm after it determined the Competition Appeal Tribunal was likely to find Qualcomm was not at fault.    The consumers’ organization, Which?, filed the claim in February 2021 on behalf of around 29 million British consumers, alleging that Qualcomm had “breached UK competition law by taking advantage of its dominance in the patent-licensing and chipset markets.”

The UK Supreme Court today issued a landmark judgment on AI patentability that is likely to impact all software patents going forward. The decision in Emotional Perception v. Comptroller General of Patents, Designs and Trade Marks primarily held that the approach taken in Aerotel Ltd v Telco Holdings Ltd [2006] EWCA Civ 1371; [2007] Bus LR 634; [2007] RPC 7 (Aerotel) should no longer be followed. Under Aerotel, courts and examiners consider a four-step test for assessing whether a claim is excluded from patent eligibility: 1) properly construe the claim, 2) Identify the actual/ alleged contribution, 3) Ask whether the contribution is excluded and 4) check if the contribution is technical.

On Thursday, the European Union Intellectual Property Office (EUIPO) and the European Patent Office (EPO) issued a joint report on IP and innovation in various industrial sectors of the European economy. Identifying IP-driven industries by analyzing registrations for IP rights within the EU, the agencies conclude that such industries contribute nearly half of the entire European gross domestic product (GDP) while also providing a third of the EU’s jobs, which offer workers larger wages on average when compared to total EU employment.

Yesterday, the European Union Intellectual Property Office (EUIPO) and the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) published the results of a joint study detailing the close connection between illicit trade in counterfeits and labor exploitation. The joint study shows clear, repeated associations between the intensity of counterfeit trade and abusive labor conditions, strongly suggesting that such conditions structurally enable the production and distribution of counterfeits.

Global litigation over standard essential patents (SEPs) is facing new strategies by implementers, mainly related to venue selection. There is an increasing risk of foreign decisions aimed at interfering with decisions on infringement of patents granted and issued in foreign jurisdictions – in clear tension with the territoriality principle. There is also a trend of abuse of process in the selection of venues within specific countries aimed at creating obstacles and delaying remedies and effective protection for national IP rights.

This year saw a world in which many employees had forms of Generative AI (GenAI) at their fingertips, either in the workplace or on their personal devices, and a world in which organizations continued to face unprecedented levels of cyber risk as they continued their digital transformation journeys. While data breach litigation is not new and tales of company confidential information being copied and pasted into open GenAI tools have haunted employers for what feels like years, trade secret issues arising from data breaches and GenAI use were not really trending issues in the courts in 2025. Indeed, perhaps surprisingly, equitable and contractual duties of confidence lay at the heart of the few cases involving trade secrets that were considered by the UK courts in 2025, with directors being under the microscope and the courts again grappling with issues around the identification and particularization of the confidential information at issue.

It’s been a year of significant decisions from the Unified Patent Court (UPC), from both the first instance Local Divisions (LDs) and Central Division (CD) and the Court of Appeal (CoA).  Jurisdiction and, as more appellate decisions become available, the substantive law on patent validity and infringement, have come into focus. Decisions relating to enforcement also provide helpful indications for the future. 

In a Progress Statement published Monday, the UK Government said that its ongoing consultation on copyright and AI has drawn over 11,500 responses, 10,112 of which were submitted via an online survey service, and that 88% of those who responded online supported requiring licenses to use copyrighted works for AI training in all cases.

In less than 2.5 years, the Unified Patent Court (UPC) has established itself as a hallmark for high-profile patent litigation. This venue is a reality that U.S. companies need to be aware of Why? U.S. companies are “at both sides of the v” before the UPC. Below are the 10 most important questions that define liability risks before the UPC, both from a defendant’s and a plaintiff’s perspective. These questions will be put into perspective and compared to U.S. district court and International Trade Commission (ITC) litigation.

Today, Mrs Justice Joanna Smith DBE of the United Kingdom’s High Court of Justice issued a highly awaited ruling in Getty Images (US) Inc. v. Stability AI Ltd., a case which was expected to have major implications in determining liability for generative artificial intelligence (AI) developers under UK intellectual property law. The 205-page decision, which mainly focuses on Getty’s trademark claim while also clarifying important aspects of secondary copyright liability in the AI context, failed to address certain fundamental questions in large part because Getty failed to raise sufficient evidence to proceed with its claim of primary copyright infringement at trial.

In September 2025, the Enlarged Board of Appeal (EBA), the highest judicial authority of the European Patent Office (EPO), issued its decision in G 2/24. The EBA addressed a procedural question: if a third party (an “intervener”) joins an ongoing appeal, can that party keep the case alive if all the original appellants withdraw? The EBA’s answer was a no. In other words, interveners play only a supporting role in appeal proceedings. They may join an existing appeal, but they cannot take over once the main participants have left the stage.

On Friday, October 10, we hosted an impromptu webinar with the intention of using that conversation as our next podcast. While this is not always feasible, because we do often have PowerPoint slides when we host webinars, this webinar was simply a conversation about a very important recent decision of the Unified Patent Court (UPC) without any slides. The case we discuss is Philips v. Belkin, where after the conclusion of all appeals, the UPC issued the first ever final permanent injunction in a case involving standard essential patents (SEPs). So, our conversation this week is about the impact and ramifications of the UPC’s final decision in Philips v. Belkin. We discussed the UPC’s final decision and permanent injunction in Philips v. Belkin with an in-house attorney from Philips and the litigation team at Bardehle Pagenberg in Germany that represented Philips in this important win. By originally having this conversation as a webinar with a live audience, I was able to incorporate questions from the audience, which you’ll hear periodically throughout the podcast.