UPC Court of Appeal: Provisional measure and interpretation

The appellant appeals against a dismissal order of the Court of First Instance on an application for a preliminary injunction. The patent in dispute protects an electronic label system for displaying information, in particular price information. The Court of First Instance was not satisfied with a sufficient degree of certainty that the contested products infringed the patent at issue. The appeal is dismissed because, on a balance of probabilities, the appellant's products do not fall within the scope of protection of the patent in suit. Claim features must always be interpreted in the light of the claim as a whole. The interpretation made is based on the wording of the claim, read in the light of the description and the drawings from the point of view of a person skilled in the art with their general technical knowledge without taking into account the prosecution history of the patent in suit. The parts of the documents of the examination proceedings before the European Patent Office cited by the parties shed no new light on this interpretation. Therefore, in the present case, the Court of Appeal does not need to address the question of whether the prosecution history can be taken into account when determining the scope of protection of a European patent (UPC 13.5.2024, CoA 1/2024)