Recently, the Court of Appeal of the Unified Patent Court (UPC) issued a procedural ruling regarding the case file access dispute between Huawei Technologies Co., Ltd. (hereinafter referred to as “Huawei”) and TP-Link: During the appeal proceedings, the earlier decision by the first-instance court allowing TP-Link to access certain documents from another patent litigation case between Huawei and Netgear shall be suspended.

This case revolves around European Patent EP 3 678 321 held by Huawei. Huawei had previously filed a patent infringement lawsuit against Netgear over this patent. TP-Link, also sued by Huawei for the same patent, applied to the court to access certain litigation documents from the Huawei-Netgear case, asserting a legitimate interest in the materials.

The Munich Regional Division ruled at first instance to grant TP-Link access to redacted materials, requiring execution within twenty days of the ruling's service. Huawei subsequently appealed, arguing that the documents contained highly sensitive technical and commercial information whose disclosure would cause irreversible harm. It requested a stay of execution of the original ruling during the appeal period.

The UPC Court of Appeal determined that failing to stay execution would allow TP-Link to complete its review of the case files before the appeal outcome, thereby rendering Huawei's appeal request meaningless. This satisfied the conditions for applying a stay of execution under Article 74(1) of the UPC Agreement. Accordingly, the court ruled that the original order shall not be enforced during the appeal proceedings, and TP-Link shall be temporarily barred from accessing the relevant case files.

The court further noted that this ruling constitutes an interim measure within the appeal process and does not constitute a final determination on the substantive dispute. Upon TP-Link's submission of its response, the court will further review whether to maintain or adjust this stay decision.

Attached is a translation of the ruling (machine translation for reference only):