UPM-Kymmene Oyj v International N&H Denmark ApS, Central Division (Munich), 24 February 2026, UPC 829/2024
The Munich branch of the Central Division has revoked (subject to any appeal) EP 2 611 800, having found the granted claims to be invalid for both added matter and lack of inventive step. The patentee’s application to amend the patent was dismissed. As the headnote of the decision records:
1. The patentee is responsible for drafting claims that adequately define the subject matter for which protection is sought. This is particularly the case for composition claims containing numerical ranges of ingredients. For such claims, the skilled person may reasonably expect that the patentee is precise and diligent in specifying the components of a claimed composition.
2. Absent an inextricable link between a claimed composition and an inventive process for the production of a known end-product, no inventive step can be acknowledged for an otherwise non-inventive composition relied upon as an intermediate product.
The granted claims related to a sugar composition. The patentee argued that claim 1 correspondence to an “intermediate product” that was formed as part of a new and advantageous process for producing a xylose-enriched sugar mixture which could be subjected to crystallisation.
However, as the Court noted, the claim was not limited to an intermediate and the Court could not accept that the inventive concept underlying the invention was the provision of an intermediate product (as argued for by the patentee). The patentee did not dispute that sugar compositions having the general composition of claim 1 were known from the prior art (at least by being obvious in the light of the prior art) and it followed that the claims were invalid.
It is also worth noting that the Court refused to admit a claim amendment application that was made at the time of the filing by the patentee of its Rejoinder, in the absence of any explanation of why it had not been possible to file it earlier in the proceedings.
A copy of the Decision can be found here.
