TCL Europe SAS v. Corning Incorporated, Central Division (Munich), 24 February 2026, UPC 337/2025
The Munich Central Division rejected a revocation claim brought by TCL Europe SAS against Corning Incorporated’s European Patent No. EP 3 296 274 B1, which concerned alkali-free, boroalumino silicate glasses for use as substrates in flat panel display devices. Added matter, sufficiency, novelty and inventive step were all in issue but the Court rejected all of TCL’s arguments.
As recorded in the Headnote:
1. A realistic starting point is typically a prior art disclosure as a whole. Absent a specific reason or pointer in the disclosure itself (or based on common general knowledge) to do so, the selection of a particular example composition as a “starting point”, merely because it happens to come “closest” to the claimed subject matter in terms of structural components, bears the risk that such selection itself already involves hindsight.
2. Where the features of a patent claim, in an interdependent way, even if they are not synergetic in the sense of having a special combination effect, provide a solution to the objective problem, ignoring these interdependencies and dividing the objective problem up into separate problems amounts to hindsight reasoning which is to be avoided in the assessment of inventive step.
A copy of the Decision can be found here.
