UPC Local Division: Partial Revocation

If the grounds for revocation only affect part of the patent in suit, the patent is limited by the corresponding amendment of the claims and partially revoked. Even in revocation proceedings before the Unified Patent Court, a patent can only be revoked to the extent that the grounds for revocation apply. Accordingly, a patent may also remain valid in the scope of individual independent claims within the complete set of claims filed as main or auxiliary requests (partially), provided this aligns with the procedural objective of the patent proprietor. The patent in suit includes, in the form of the system claim based on original claim 1 and the method claim based on original claim 3, two independent claims. The system claim and the method claim do not build on each other in such a way that revocation of the method claim would necessarily require revocation of the system claim—because they constitute distinct claim sets. The broader method claim falls short of the features claimed and required by the system claim, and in particular, it does not include an integrated circuit or a third device feature mediating between the first and second electric devices. The fact that claim 3 proved to be entirely invalid therefore does not lead to a complete revocation of the patent in suit (Local Division Hamburg, 26 August 2024, Court of First Instance 54/2023).