Ballinno v UEFA (UPC_CFI_151/2024)
Decision date:
03 June 2024
Osborne Clarke summary
- The claimant, Ballinno, is a limited liability company with a sole shareholder and one board member who is one of the inventors named in the patent in suit. Ballinno is the proprietor of a patent covering a method and system for detecting offside play, which it acquired from the original applicant. The patent is in force in the Netherlands and Germany.
- During the course of the present proceedings, defendant 3 (Kinexon Sports) filed a revocation action at the Paris CD. The application dealt with in this judgment was Ballinno's application for provisional measures against the defendants in relation to Kinexon's "Connected Ball Technology", which was supplied to UEFA for the European Football Championship.in summer 2024. Ballinno's application was issued to prevent use of the allegedly infringing ball during the championship.
- The defendants contested the urgency of the proceedings, arguing that there was a lack of urgency from a temporal perspective as per Rule 209.2(b) RoP. The Hamburg LD noted that urgency is only lacking if the infringed party has behaved in a negligent and hesitant manner in the pursuit of its claims, such that it must be concluded that they are not interested in promptly enforcing their rights.
- The court concluded that in the circumstances, it would have been clear to Ballinno following a letter received from Kinexon in November 2023 that judicial recourse would be necessary to settle the matter. Ballinno did not provide any evidence of the steps it took to further investigate the facts or technology, including known potentially infringing uses of the product, and so it deemed the delay (here, almost three months) without significant efforts to clarify the possible patent infringement as not treating the matter with the necessary urgency.
- Moreover, the Hamburg LD held that it was not convinced with sufficient certainty that the defendants infringed the patent whether literally or by equivalence. In light of this finding, the court left open the question of the validity of the patent.
- As such, the application for a preliminary injunction was rejected.
Issue
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