Irides: Weekly global patent litigation update

This edition features updates from: India, Brazil and the Unified Patent Court (UPC).

The Irides Weekly Update is our round-up of patent litigation news highlights from around the world.
 

India

Delhi High Court finds no prima facie infringement and refuses interim relief in Conqueror v Xiaomi. 
[CNR No. DLHC010711982025]

On 7 September 2026, the Delhi High Court dismissed Conqueror Innovations’ appeal from the refusal of an interim injunction against Xiaomi. The patent concerned anti-theft functionality intended to enable the owner of a stolen device to locate, monitor and ultimately recover the device, even where a thief attempted to disable security features or remove the SIM card. The Court considered whether Xiaomi's 'Find Device' functionality infringed the patent and whether Conqueror Innovations was entitled to an interim injunction. 

On the infringement question, the Court ruled that the first instance judge's decision that Xiaomi’s 'Find Device' functionality was materially different to that of the patent and that Conqueror had not, therefore, established a prima facie case of infringement was "plausible and legally sustainable".

As to the availability of an interim injunction, the Court considered the patentee's Form 27 working statements and the patentee's delay in starting the proceedings, and the time remaining until patent expiry.

Xiaomi had first launched the accused devices in India in 2014. To explain the apparent delay in issuing its claim, Conqueror argued that it only became aware of Xiaomi's alleged infringement in 2023. However, the Court considered the Form 27 filings to demonstrate that, by at least 2015, the patentee was aware of smartphone manufacturers using technologies it regarded as falling within the scope of the patent. The Court characterised this as a conscious delay of approximately nine years, holding that the Form 27 filings undermined the patentee's explanation for the delay and demonstrated a lack of urgency inconsistent with the grant of interim relief.

The Court also considered the short period remaining before expiry of the patent. The patent was due to expire on 17 October 2026, leaving less than two months of term remaining when the appeal was decided. Citing the recent Novo Nordisk v Dr Reddy’s decision, the Court questioned what practical purpose an injunction of such limited duration would serve, particularly where the defendant had been marketing the relevant products for many years.

Accordingly, the Court agreed that the balance of convenience favoured Xiaomi and dismissed the appeal. The patentee can pursue its claim at trial, and if successful, seek damages.
 

Brazil

Brazilian Court issues Preliminary Injunction against Disney+ over video encoding patent.

On 9 September 2026, the 6th Commercial Court of Rio de Janeiro granted an interim injunction in favour of IBEX PT Holdings against The Walt Disney Company (Brazil) Ltda in respect of a patent relating to video encoding technology associated with H.265/HEVC compression. The Court considered technical infringement and validity of the patent, and Disney's jurisdiction and exhaustion defences.  

The patent concerns encoding techniques linked to Advanced Motion Vector Prediction (AMVP). Following a detailed technical investigation involving a Court appointed expert, written questions, supplementary reports and oral examination, the Court concluded that Disney's use of HEVC encoding for content made available through Disney+ in Brazil likely infringed the patent. The Court also rejected Disney's validity challenge on a preliminary basis, relying on both the statutory presumption of validity and the expert's conclusions.

As to jurisdiction, Disney argued that the relevant encoding activities took place outside Brazil and therefore could not infringe a Brazilian patent. The Court rejected that approach, holding that a rigid focus on the geographic location of individual technical steps was ill suited to a modern streaming service. Instead, the Court viewed the provision of encoded content to Brazilian subscribers as an integrated commercial activity directed at the Brazilian market. In doing so, the Court expressly drew support from recent German and UPC decisions addressing similar issues, and adopted what it described as an evolutionary interpretation of Brazilian patent law to address the realities of internet based services.

The Court was equally dismissive of Disney's exhaustion arguments - termed the 'double dipping' defence. Disney contended that royalties may already have been paid elsewhere in the supply chain, particularly by device manufacturers whose products decode HEVC content. The Court found that argument unsupported by the evidence. More fundamentally, the Court was not persuaded that device level licensing necessarily exhausted rights in relation to a separate streaming service.

Therefore, the Court awarded the Preliminary Injunction (PI). The judgment concludes with a discussion of how to enforce such an injunction in the event that Disney did not comply. The Court noted that a stream could not be seized in the same way as a physical product. Accordingly, the Court indicated that a failure to comply could justify orders directed at third parties involved in the distribution of Disney+ in Brazil, such as measures requiring app stores and manufacturers of televisions and mobile devices to suspend access to the service. The Court viewed such steps as the digital equivalent of seizing infringing products in a conventional patent case.
 

UPC

Abbott secures UPC-wide Preliminary Injunction over Continuous Glucose Monitoring patent.
[Abbott v Shenzhen UPC_CFI_1086/2026]

On 7 September 2026, the Milan Local Division (LD) granted Abbott a UPC-wide PI against the Chinese company SiSensing and four of its subsidiaries. Abbott is the main supplier of Continuous Glucose Monitoring (CGM) products for diabetes in the UPC contracting member states. The Court found it more likely than not that the defendants’ CGM product infringed Abbott’s patent and rejected the validity challenges at the provisional stage. 

Procedurally, the Court held that new non-infringement arguments raised around one month before the oral hearing were admissible, emphasising that claim construction is a matter of law on which the Court may elaborate of its own motion. In the context of expedited PI proceedings, excluding such arguments would have constituted an overly rigid application of the UPC’s front-loaded procedure, particularly as Abbott had a fair opportunity to respond.

On claim construction, the Court rejected both parties’ positions in favour of what it described as a “balanced” interpretation. This approach proved decisive for disputed features relating to the cap, insertion mechanism and introducer, leading the Court to conclude that infringement was more likely than not.

The defendants’ validity attack based on insufficiency, added matter and inventive step was unsuccessful. In particular, the Court found that the patent disclosed at least one workable technical principle and pointed towards alternative possible deployment mechanisms. It was also influenced by a potential contradiction between the defendants’ insufficiency case, which argued that implementing the claimed functions required inventive skill, and their inventive step attack, which relied on an allegedly obvious prior art combination producing the claimed outcome. On the evidence before it, the Court considered that the patent was more likely than not valid. 

The Court was satisfied that Abbott had acted without undue delay after learning of the planned launch and that the balance of interests favoured relief. Although the defendants’ product has been on the market in Spain for approximately one year and there was no significant evidence of price erosion, the Court accepted that entry into reimbursement-based markets could create pricing effects that would be difficult to reverse. It therefore granted Abbott a UPC-wide injunction, an information order and interim costs of €120,000, while declining to order delivery up of products at the provisional stage.
 

UPC

Munich Local Division upholds DivX streaming patent and finds Netflix liable for indirect infringement. 
[DivX v Netflix UPC_CFI_465/2025 et al]

On 15 September 2026, the Munich LD upheld DivX's unitary patent relating to progressive media streaming and found that Netflix indirectly infringed through the supply of its streaming software. Netflix had sought revocation of the patent and denied infringement, arguing that the patent was anticipated or rendered obvious by various multimedia and streaming disclosures and that, properly construed, its software did not fall within the scope of the claims. The Court rejected both lines of attack, dismissed the revocation counterclaim and granted UPC-wide injunctive relief, information and accounting orders, and a declaration of liability for damages.

The validity challenge focused primarily on prior art relating to interactive browsing of 3D environments, together with a series of streaming and multimedia references relied on for inventive step attacks. A key issue was whether the prior art disclosed the claimed "progressive playback" of a "media sequence". The Court drew a clear distinction between rendering static views within a 3D image environment and the playback of temporally ordered media such as video or audio. On that basis, it held that the prior art did not disclose the core concept of the claim. The Court also rejected the inventive step attacks, finding that the cited references did not provide sufficient motivation for the skilled person to arrive at the claimed approach to byte range identification and request queue management.

Turning to claim construction, the Court rejected Netflix's attempts to read limitations from preferred embodiments into the claims and adopted a functional interpretation of a number of disputed features, including "media sequence", "request queue", "mask" and "byte ranges". It held, for example, that a request queue was not confined to any particular queue structure and that a mask was not limited to the bitmap implementation described in the patent. That functional approach carried through to the infringement analysis where the Court concluded that Netflix's Cadmium player implemented structures corresponding to the claimed request queue and mask despite differences in terminology and software design. The Court also accepted that the claimed byte range functionality could be implemented using time range based calculations, noting that the claim did not prescribe a particular technical method for determining whether required content had already been downloaded. The Court further held that the supply of streaming software constituted the provision of means relating to an essential element of the invention, giving rise to indirect infringement under Art. 26 UPCA.

The decision is likely to attract attention for its approach to claim construction. The Court rejected a number of attempts to narrow the claims by reference to specific embodiments and instead focused on the technical function performed by the claimed features. That approach proved decisive throughout the judgment, enabling the Court to distinguish the principal novelty citation, reject the inventive step attacks and find infringement by Netflix's software. The judgment may also be seen as further support for the view that, in cases involving computer implemented inventions, the UPC may focus primarily on what a claimed feature does rather than the specific way in which it is implemented.
 

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