Fujifilm v. Kodak and the new architecture of cross-border patent enforcement at the Unified Patent Court.

Introduction

On 2 June 2026, the Court of Appeal of the Unified Patent Court did two things that, on their face, point in opposite directions. It dissolved an injunction that had kept Kodak's printing plates off the market in both Germany and the United Kingdom -- a clear, tangible win for the defendant. And in the same breath it confirmed, in the most complete terms the court has yet offered, that the UPC's reach extends well beyond the states that signed its Agreement, into the United Kingdom and, by clear implication, into Spain, Poland, Switzerland, and every other European Patent Convention market sitting outside the UPC system.

For anyone advising patent owners or accused infringers in Europe, that combination is the whole story. Fujifilm v. Kodak is not really a case about printing plates. It is a case about how far a single European forum can now project its authority -- and about the gulf between a court that can hear your dispute and a court that will actually give the patentee what it came for.

I  A PRINTING-PLATE FIGHT THAT BECAME A LANDMARK

The road to Luxembourg

The underlying commercial dispute is almost mundane. Fujifilm and Kodak are two of the largest manufacturers of planographic and lithographic printing plates -- the aluminum sheets that carry an image onto a press in commercial offset printing. Fujifilm holds a family of European patents on plate-manufacturing methods and chemistry, and from 2023 it brought that portfolio against Kodak's German subsidiaries across two divisions of the new court.

At the Mannheim Local Division, Fujifilm asserted two patents: EP 3 511 174 (“EP’174”) and EP 3 476 616 (“EP’616”). A parallel action in Düsseldorf over EP 3 594 009 had already failed in January 2025, when that division revoked the patent for the Contracting Member State territory in which it had effect -- in practice, Germany -- on Kodak’s counterclaim for revocation, and dismissed the infringement action, including the UK claim. But the Düsseldorf decision is worth remembering for another reason: it was among the first UPC rulings to signal -- even in defeat -- that the court considered itself competent to adjudicate the UK designation of a European patent. That signal arrived just weeks before the Court of Justice of the European Union would make the same idea the law of the land.

Mannheim moved faster on the merits. In April 2025 it held EP’174, in amended form, valid and infringed in Germany, ordered Kodak to stop, and awarded damages. (Kodak fared better on EP’616, which Mannheim revoked for lack of inventive step.) Then, after the CJEU handed down BSH v. Electrolux, the Mannheim judges extended the EP’174 ruling to the United Kingdom -- issuing, in July 2025, a UK injunction from a court seated in Germany, over a patent the UK no longer has any role in administering. When Kodak did not fully satisfy the information and rendering-of-accounts obligations attached to that judgment, Mannheim imposed a penalty exceeding €1.7 million in January 2026.

It was that package -- validity, infringement, a cross-border injunction, and an enforcement penalty -- that Kodak carried up to the Court of Appeal. The appeals were argued over two days before the second panel under presiding judge Rian Kalden, and decided on 2 June 2026.

What the second panel produced is unusual for its range. Few UPC appeal judgments have tackled so many fundamental questions in a single instrument. Alongside long-arm jurisdiction, the decision works through claim construction, the requirements of the private prior-use defence, the front-loaded character of UPC proceedings and the treatment of late-filed evidence, and the contours of joint-tortfeasorship liability. It is, in effect, a primer on the modern cross-border patent action -- which is part of why it will be cited far beyond the printing-plate trade.

€1.7M Penalty imposed by Mannheim before the appeal was decided

3 European patents asserted across Mannheim & Düsseldorf

2 Injunctions (DE + UK) dissolved on the merits

II  THE CONCEPT

What “long-arm jurisdiction” actually means

The phrase “long-arm jurisdiction” is borrowed loosely from American practice, but in the European patent context it means something specific: the ability of a court in one country to adjudicate infringement of the parts of a European patent that take effect in other countries -- including countries outside the EU entirely.

For two decades, the instinct of European practitioners was that this could not be done safely. The CJEU's 2006 decision in GAT v. LuK (C-4/03) held that, where the validity of a patent is in issue, exclusive jurisdiction lies with the courts of the state that granted it. Because validity is raised as a defence in virtually every serious infringement case, GAT was widely read as a practical bar to consolidated, cross-border litigation. Patentees who wanted relief in five countries sued in five countries.

BSH Hausgeräte v. Electrolux (C-339/22), decided by the Grand Chamber on 25 February 2025, dismantled that assumption. The CJEU held that where a defendant is domiciled in an EU Member State, the courts of that state may hear an infringement action covering the foreign designations of a European patent -- including designations in non-EU “third states” such as the United Kingdom or Turkey -- and may do so even when the defendant attacks validity by way of defence. The home court cannot rule on validity erga omnes for another Member State's patent (that remains reserved), but it is not deprived of the infringement action; and for genuinely third-state patents it may even assess validity inter partes as a step in deciding infringement, because the exclusive-jurisdiction rule of Article 24(4) of the Brussels I bis Regulation does not apply to non-EU courts at all.

“BSH recast the map. The open question was how the UPC -- itself a creature of EU law, common to several Member States -- would absorb it.”

III  THE HEADLINE HOLDING

The arm is here to stay

The Court of Appeal's first move was to put the existence of long-arm jurisdiction beyond doubt. Kodak had argued that the UPC's competence is confined to its own territory -- that Article 34 of the UPC Agreement, which describes the territorial scope of the court's decisions, operates as a ceiling on what the court may adjudicate. The Court rejected that reading. Article 34, it held, defines where a UPC decision takes effect; it does not limit the disputes the court may hear. Nothing in the Agreement suggests that the contracting states meant to give their common court a narrower reach than the national courts it replaced would have enjoyed in the same cross-border situation.

That point is structural and important. Under Articles 71a and 71b(1) of the Brussels I bis Regulation, the UPC is treated as a “common court” of its member states -- stepping into the shoes of national courts where the Regulation would have given those courts jurisdiction. The Court of Appeal read Article 3(c) and Article 24(3) of the UPC Agreement as confirming that the UPCA is not confined to validations within the UPC’s own territory and may require the application of non-contracting states’ law -- so the architecture points one way: the UPC’s adjudicatory jurisdiction is as wide as a German court’s would have been.

And a German court's jurisdiction, after BSH, is wide indeed. Because Kodak's defendants were domiciled in Germany, jurisdiction followed from Article 4 of the Brussels I bis Regulation -- the basic rule that a defendant may be sued where it is domiciled. Following Owusu v. Jackson (C-281/02) as confirmed in BSH, the Court emphasised that a court seised on the basis of domicile may not decline jurisdiction on the ground that a court elsewhere -- say, a UK court -- would be the more natural forum. The doctrine of forum non conveniens has no place here. Nor, the Court held, does accepting such jurisdiction offend the TRIPS Agreement.

There is a subtle but consequential corollary. Because jurisdiction flowed from the defendants' domicile rather than from where the infringing acts occurred, the Court did not need to satisfy itself that the Kodak entities had actually committed infringing acts in the UK in order to take the case. Kodak had argued that Fujifilm failed to plead plausible UK acts by each defendant; the Court treated that as a question for the merits, not for jurisdiction. The threshold to get into the UPC, in other words, is the defendant's address -- not the strength of the patentee's cross-border theory.

IV  THE CONCEPTUAL BREAKTHROUGH

Accepting jurisdiction is not exercising it

If the Court had stopped there, the decision would have been a straightforward application of BSH. What makes Fujifilm v. Kodak a genuine landmark is the distinction it draws next -- between accepting jurisdiction and exercising it.

Accepting jurisdiction is the binary question BSH answered: does the court have power to hear the dispute over a foreign designation? For a UPC-domiciled defendant, the answer is yes, and there is little the defendant can do about it. But having the power is not the same as deploying it without constraint. The Court held that how the UPC uses its long arm is governed by a second layer of rules -- drawn from the validity limits the Brussels regime itself imposes, from the Lugano Convention, and from the international-law principle of comity, under which courts of one state extend a measure of respect to the courts and judgments of another.

This two-step structure is the intellectual core of the judgment, and it is what turns long-arm jurisdiction from a blunt instrument into a calibrated one. The court will almost always have jurisdiction over a domiciled defendant. Whether, and on what terms, it will actually grant cross-border relief is a separate inquiry -- one in which the type of foreign designation, the status of the home patent, and the deference owed to national courts all do real work.

V  THE FRAMEWORK

Three scenarios, two categories

To structure the second inquiry, the Court of Appeal sorted foreign designations into two categories (set out in Fig. 3) and infringement actions into three scenarios. The categories turn on a single line: is the foreign designation in a state where EU validity rules still bind the UPC, or not? Onto those two categories the Court mapped three scenarios, each calibrated to what is happening with the home -- UPC-territory -- part of the patent.

WHY THIS IS CLEVER

The conditional injunction squares a circle. It gives the patentee genuine, here-and-now relief across non-UPC markets, while respecting that only the national court may settle validity erga omnes. Comity is satisfied not by declining to act, but by making the relief contingent on the foreign court's word.

VI  THE MERITS

So why did Kodak win?

Here is the paradox that opened this piece. The Court confirmed jurisdiction, upheld the validity of EP’174 -- rejecting Kodak's revocation appeal, so the patent survives -- and built an entire framework for cross-border relief. And Kodak still walked away with both injunctions dissolved. The reason is the cleanest possible illustration of why the accept/exercise distinction matters: clearing the jurisdictional threshold tells you nothing about whether the patentee can actually win on the facts, under the law that governs the foreign act.

On the German designation, Kodak escaped through a national door: a private prior-use right. Article 28 of the UPC Agreement preserves whatever prior-use defences national law affords, and German law affords a robust one to a party that, before the priority date, was already using the invention or had made serious preparations to do so. The Court found that defence made out on the German facts -- and a successful prior-use defence defeats infringement as surely as invalidity would, without touching the patent's validity at all.

On the UK designation, Fujifilm's claim collapsed on the merits under English law -- the law the UPC was bound to apply to acts said to occur in the United Kingdom. The structural problem was that the importation into the UK was carried out by Kodak's UK company, which was not among the German defendants before the court. To reach the German entities for UK harm, Fujifilm had to establish joint tortfeasorship, and the UPC has confirmed -- citing its own Belkin v. Philips -- that its competence extends to such theories. But competence is not liability. Applying English authority (Generics v. Lundbeck and Lifestyle Equities v. Ahmed), the Court held that merely supplying goods outside the United Kingdom to a UK party that later sells them there is not joint tortfeasorship, even where the supplier knows exactly what the buyer will do. English law demands procurement or a common design, coupled with knowledge of the essential facts that make the act wrongful -- and on the evidence those elements were not established against any Kodak company before Fujifilm first alleged infringement.

VII  THE ENFORCEMENT GAP

Issuing relief is not the same as enforcing it

There is a further wrinkle practitioners should not lose. Even when the UPC issues a cross-border injunction, the right to enforce it by coercive means in a non-member state does not follow automatically. The Mannheim division flagged the point when it extended relief to the UK: feeling able to enjoin conduct touching a non-UPC market is not the same as possessing a self-executing power to compel compliance there. Enforcement in the foreign territory ultimately depends on that territory's own courts and rules -- and on the comity that the Court of Appeal has now woven into the doctrine. A UPC injunction reaching the UK is a powerful commercial lever; it is not a UK court order, and the gap between the two is where the next round of disputes will be fought.

PRACTICE NOTE -- THE COMITY DIMENSION

The framework is, in part, a peace overture. By tying cross-border relief to national validity rulings and refusing to claim automatic enforcement abroad, the UPC is signalling to courts in London, Madrid, Warsaw and Bern that it intends to respect the territorial limits of each court's authority -- and expects the same respect in return.

VIII  THE WIDER LANDSCAPE

A line of cases, not a single decision

Fujifilm v. Kodak did not arrive in isolation. It is the most fully reasoned entry in a fast-moving line of post-BSH cases through which the UPC is mapping the outer edges of its reach. Crucially, the cases are converging on a coherent picture: jurisdiction grounded in a UPC-domiciled defendant is broad and hard to resist; jurisdiction stretched over non-EU defendants through anchors and intermediaries is genuinely uncertain and now sits with the CJEU; and in every case the claimant must plead its way in.

IX  WHAT IT MEANS IN PRACTICE

The new strategic calculus

For patent owners, the implications are substantial. A single action in a single forum, conducted in one language on the UPC's brisk timetable, can now yield relief touching markets the patentee once had to litigate country by country -- the UK, Spain, Poland and Switzerland among them -- provided a defendant is domiciled within the UPC. That sharpens the case for choosing the UPC over national courts wherever a suitable domiciled defendant exists. The catch is that the cross-border component is no longer a free add-on: patentees must build the foreign case with the same rigor as the home case -- the right defendants, evidence of acts in each territory, and a liability theory that survives under each territory's substantive law.

For accused infringers, the message is to stop fighting the wrong battle. Where jurisdiction rests on domicile, attacking jurisdiction is largely a dead end; energy is better spent on the merits, on national prior-use and other defences, and -- critically -- on moving quickly in the relevant national revocation forum. Under Scenario III, a pending or successful national invalidity ruling is what causes a conditional cross-border injunction to fall away. A defendant that wants to neutralise the UPC's long arm over its home market should be litigating validity at home, fast.

X  WHAT REMAINS OPEN

The questions still in play

Two large questions are unresolved. The first is the companion appeal: the Court of Appeal has yet to rule on EP’616, the second Mannheim patent, which the local division revoked for want of inventive step and which Fujifilm is fighting to revive. The second, and weightier, is Dyson v. Dreame itself -- now before the CJEU, and likely to remain there into 2028 or beyond, given that BSH took the better part of three years. Until Luxembourg speaks, the reach of the UPC over genuinely foreign defendants, joined through European intermediaries, stays provisional.

But the direction of travel is now unmistakable. In a little over a year, the UPC has gone from an untested court of a handful of founding states to a forum whose decisions can shape commercial outcomes across the whole of the European Patent Convention's territory. Fujifilm v. Kodak is the clearest statement yet of both halves of that proposition: the arm is long, and it is here to stay, but the patentee who reaches with it had better be sure of what it is holding.

Erick Robinson  ·  Partner, Cherry Johnson Siegmund James, PC

This article is provided for general informational purposes only, reflects the author’s personal analysis, and does not constitute legal advice or create an attorney–client relationship. Court decisions and their interpretation may evolve; readers should consult qualified counsel regarding any specific matter.