Good faith (infringement)

The good faith of the person suspected of having committed acts of infringement of intellectual property, in other words their ignorance of the reproduction of a creation protected by intellectual property, will only have an impact on the classification of the infringement, in civil law, in cases of indirect patent infringement, which are exhaustively listed by law.

Thus, in the case of a patent right, acts committed by a person other than the manufacturer or importer will only incur the liability of the person committing them if they were aware of the said patent (articles L. 615-1 and L. 613-3 of the Intellectual Property Code).

The situation is different in criminal law, where good faith systematically plays a role since an offense can only be characterized by a material element, on the one hand, and a moral element (intention to cause harm), on the other.