On 12 June 2026, the Mannheim Regional Division of the Unified Patent Court (UPC) delivered its first-instance judgment in the DJI patent infringement case, dismissing all infringement claims brought by the claimant, Irdeto B.V., whilst also dismissing DJI’s counterclaim seeking to invalidate the patent. The court found the patent in question to be valid but ruled that DJI’s products did not infringe it; both parties were ordered to bear their own legal costs.

The plaintiff in this case is the Dutch software security company Irdeto, whilst the defendants include DJI Europe B.V., DJI GmbH and the e-commerce operator Solectric GmbH. Irdeto argued that the security modules SELinux and dm-verity within the Linux/Android operating systems used in several DJI drones and their remote controllers (such as the Mavic 3 series, Air 3 and Inspire 3) collectively constitute the “security software agent” described in the patent in question, EP2831787 B1, and that they infringe the methods protected by claims 1, 3, 4, 1012 and the method protected by system claim 14.

The patent in question was filed on 30 March 2012 and granted on 8 July 2020; it relates to a method for preventing and detecting security threats to a device’s operating system and authenticated applications. Following a hearing, the panel of judges at the Mannheim Regional Court concluded that DJI’s products did not implement the technical solution claimed by the patent.

The court provided a detailed interpretation of claim 1 in its judgment. The panel noted that the core improvement of the patent lies in providing a dynamic security mechanism, whereby the security software agent must, whilst the kernel is running, receive requests from the kernel via an upcall and verify those requests in real time. This dynamic approach is designed to overcome the shortcomings of existing static platform security (such as verification only at boot time), which can be circumvented or subverted.

However, the court found that the dm-verity technology employed in DJI’s drones is used solely during the boot process, and there is no indication that dm-verity was configured to perform verification at runtime. Although the claimant argued that certain kernel modules might be loaded at runtime and trigger dm-verity checks, it failed to provide any concrete evidence demonstrating that, in the DJI products at issue, any system-level applications or software libraries were indeed dynamically loaded during operation and subjected to dm-verity verification. On the contrary, according to the architecture of DJI’s products, the system-level applications and libraries providing basic functions such as flight, navigation and video transmission are all fully loaded at boot-up.

Furthermore, the court found that dm Verity is not mounted via hooks (hooks/upcalls) within the LSM framework, as is the case with SELinux, whereas Claim 1 of the patent explicitly requires that the security software agent must receive requests via an upcall. Aideed also failed to demonstrate that SELinux and dm Verity together constitute a single ‘security software agent’ capable of receiving requests via an upcall and performing real-time verification. On the basis of the above reasons, the court dismissed all claims in the infringement action.

In its defence, DJI simultaneously filed a counterclaim for patent revocation, arguing that the patent in question lacked novelty and inventive step, was insufficiently disclosed, and contained added matter; however, this was rejected by the court. Ultimately, the court ruled to dismiss DJI’s counterclaim for revocation, and the patent in question remains valid in Germany and the Netherlands.

It is worth noting that the parties are also involved in several parallel lawsuits in the United States and China. In October 2025, DJI filed a lawsuit in the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Texas, alleging that Aideed had infringed four of its US patents; in China, DJI initiated invalidity challenges against four of Aideed’s patents, with the China National Intellectual Property Administration issuing decisions between January and March 2026, declaring two of them wholly invalid and upholding the validity of the other two. Eddie, meanwhile, filed a declaratory judgment action for non-infringement in Michigan, USA, in February 2026.

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