Posts in Europe

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.

On October 7, a coalition of 25 experts in intellectual property and competition law who serve or have served as U.S. judges, U.S. government officials, legal scholars and economists submitted a comment to the United Kingdom Intellectual Property Office (UKIPO) as part of that agency’s Open Consultation on Standard Essential Patents (SEPs) in order to correct various misconceptions regarding SEPs that have arisen in both scholarly and political debates. The letter from IP and competition law experts underscores the lack of empirical evidence substantiating claims of patent holdup and royalty stacking and highlights cautionary tales from the European Commission’s recent failures to establish SEP rate determination procedures like those proposed by UKIPO.

The UK Intellectual Property Office (UKIPO) launched a consultation on standard essential patents (“Consultation”) in July of this year, with the stated goal of creating “a more balanced system that works for everyone involved – from the innovators who create patented technologies to the businesses that use them to create products we all depend on.” And like the EC and aforementioned agencies of the United States government, the UKIPO takes up the mantle of protecting SME interests. While the Consultation, for the most part, seeks feedback on the solutions being proposed, analyzing the underlying problems purporting to be addressed is equally, if not more, important.

Last week, reports surfaced that spokespeople from the European Commission had confirmed the official withdrawal of legislative draft proposals that would have increased the European Union’s (EU) regulatory oversight over both standard-essential patent (SEP) licensing and civil liability of artificial intelligence (AI) products and services. While the decision to abandon these proposals was first made public this February, the EU Commission’s official withdrawal underscores ongoing tensions between the tech lobby and consumer advocates in the AI sector.

In its decision of July 2, 2025, the Enlarged Board of Appeal (EBA) of the European Patent Office in G 1/23 introduced a shift in European patent law’s treatment of publicly available products, especially where their composition is not fully disclosed or reproducible. G 1/23 has broad implications for patent practitioners across all technical fields, as it reshapes the boundaries of what constitutes prior art under the European Patent Convention and affects how publicly available products, product descriptions, and marketing materials, are assessed in determining novelty and inventive step.

Thirty-one artists from across Europe posted videos today urging the EU Commission to “Stay True to the [AI] Act.” The slogan is part of a campaign that criticizes the EU’s implementation of the European Artificial Intelligence (AI) Act, which the campaign’s website says “should protect artists” but that the EU is instead “watering down the legislation – failing to hold AI companies to account.”

The European Commission on Thursday published “The General-Purpose AI Code of Practice,” which is meant to complement the European Artificial Intelligence (AI) Act approved last year. The Code was developed by 13 independent experts across four working groups and with input from over 1,000 stakeholders, according to the European Commission. The EU AI Act came into force on August 1, 2024, with most provisions of the regulation applying as of August 2, 2026. However, the regulation said that compliance for prohibited practices were to be in effect by February 2, 2025, considering “the unacceptable risk associated with the use of AI in certain ways.”

The Unified Patent Court (UPC) has quickly become an important forum for pharmaceutical and biotech patent disputes in Europe. In 2024 and early 2025, a consistent theme has been the interplay between UPC proceedings and existing venues like European Patent Office (EPO) oppositions and national courts. Innovators and generic or biosimilar companies are now coordinating multi-front strategies engaging the UPC for pan-European relief while leveraging EPO opposition and selecting national litigations.

On the same day that the U.S. Copyright Office (USCO) officially released part three of its study into the effects of artificial intelligence (AI) on copyright law, the European Union Intellectual Property Office (EUIPO) announced its own 436-page report on AI and copyright. The EUIPO report was compiled by a research team of the University of Turin Law School and the Nexa Center for Internet & Society from the Polytechnic of Turin. It was based on “desk research as well as interviews from key stakeholder groups including, copyright holders, AI companies, technology solution providers as well as public organisations,” according to the EUIPO.

The UK Court of Appeal today ruled that Apple must pay Optis Cellular Technology LLC $502 million for a worldwide fair reasonable and non-discriminatory (FRAND) license to its 4G standard essential patents (SEPs) patents. With interest and fees, the total amount exceeds $700 million. Optis sued Apple in 2019, and a May 2023 ruling by Mr Justice Marcus Smith at the High Court of England and Wales awarded $56.43 million to Optis as a lump sum reasonable royalty for Apple’s infringement of the SEPs, a total that pales in comparison with damages verdicts that Optis has earned in litigation against Apple elsewhere.

Yesterday, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce’s Global Innovation Policy Center published the 2025 International IP Index, the Chamber’s annual assessment of legal frameworks for intellectual property (IP) protections in countries across the globe. While this year’s IP Index marked little movement among the top nations for IP legal frameworks, leaving the United States as the top nation overall for yet another year, stronger IP protections in Middle Eastern countries and efforts to weaken IP protections for pharmaceuticals in the EU and U.S. were among the key findings driving changes to this year’s report.

A European Patent Office (EPO) opposition is often the first line of defense for a party seeking to invalidate a European patent. Oppositions must be filed within nine months of the patent’s grant, and they offer a centralized way to revoke or limit the patent in all designated states. With the Unified Patent Ccourt (UPC) now providing a parallel central revocation mechanism (with no deadline) for UPC member states, it was inevitable that some patents would face both an EPO opposition and a UPC revocation/infringement action at the same time. The interplay between these proceedings has quickly become a critical issue, raising questions of stays, inconsistent outcomes, and tactical timing. Case law from 2024–2025 illustrates how the UPC and parties are managing double-tracked disputes.