This ruling marks yet another reversal in this two-and-a-half-year-long patent battle. Previously, in April 2025, the Mannheim Regional Division had ruled in the first instance that EP 174 was valid and had been infringed, while invalidating EP 616 on the grounds of lack of inventive step. In July of the same year, the Mannheim Division exercised long-arm jurisdiction to extend the injunction to the United Kingdom. In January 2026, the Mannheim Regional Court fined Kodak 1.72 million euros for allegedly violating its injunction obligations.

This litigation primarily revolves around the various grounds for “post-grant opposition” set forth in Section 25 of the Indian Patents Act, covering six core issues: whether the patented technology had been disclosed in the prior art before the filing date; whether the relevant technology was known to the public or in open use in India before the filing date; whether the patent possesses inventive step over the prior art; whether the subject matter of the patent meets the requirements for grant and does not fall under the exclusion for “mere computer programs” in Section 3 (k)’s exclusion for “mere computer programs,” whether the complete specification clearly and fully discloses the technical solution to satisfy the requirement of sufficient disclosure, and whether the patent holder violated the statutory obligation to disclose information regarding foreign patents—six core issues.

Recently, the 86th session of the WIPO Coordination Committee released a document titled “Appointment of Deputy Directors General and Assistant Directors General.” The document indicates that Shen Changyu, Director General of the China National Intellectual Property Administration, has been nominated as a candidate for WIPO Deputy Director General, responsible for the Brands and Designs Division.

On July 10, 2026, Apple Inc. filed a lawsuit in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, alleging that OpenAI and two former Apple employees—Liu and Chen—stole the company’s trade secrets and used the information in the research and development of OpenAI’s consumer hardware business.

The patent at issue in this case is European Patent EP4258663, titled “Multiple Sign Bit Hiding Within a Transform Unit.” This patent relates to the field of video coding technology and primarily concerns coding methods for hiding the sign bits of transform coefficients during the video compression process. By processing multiple sign bits within a single transform unit, it improves video coding efficiency and reduces the coding bit rate, and can be applied to video coding technologies such as HEVC (H.265).

Recently, China Telecom and Lenovo Group officially joined the Avanci EV Charger patent pool as licensees. At the same time, the patent pool project also signed a licensing agreement with an unnamed Japanese manufacturer. Previously, on July 1, Nokia had joined the pool as a new licensee.

On 6 July 2026, the Commercial Court of Casablanca, Morocco, handed down two judgements in the patent infringement case brought by Ericsson against Tecno Mobile Limited and Itel Mobility Limited, subsidiaries of Transsion Holdings, ordering the defendants to immediately cease the sale in Morocco of smartphone products infringing multiple of Ericsson’s standard-essential patents (SEPs). This marks the first SEP ruling in Morocco’s judicial history and is also the first time a ruling has been handed down on a SEP case in the field of patent enforcement in Africa.

On 3 July 2026, the Düsseldorf Regional Division of the Unified Patent Court (UPC) issued a new procedural order in the patent infringement case between Ecovacs Robotics and Roborock, rejecting Ecovacs’ application for the disclosure of evidence.

On 1 July 2026, the Delhi High Court delivered an oral judgment in the case of InterDigital v Transsion regarding SEP infringement, ordering Transsion to deposit pro tem security with the court to balance the interests of both parties during the proceedings. Previously, Transsion had opposed this interim measure on the grounds that the validity of the patents in question was in doubt and that InterDigital had failed to provide comparable third-party licence agreements; however, the judge did not uphold these arguments.

The central issue in the case concerns the conditions for the establishment of an implied licence. LiTL had previously licensed its patents to an unnamed company, of which HP, Dell and Asus were all customers. The three defendants consequently raised a defence of implied licence. The patent holder, LiTL, argued that for an implied licence to exist, the alleged infringer must sell products that have ‘no non-infringing use’. However, Judge Choe-Groves explicitly stated that this requirement is ‘irrelevant’ where the implied licence derives from an express licence .