Agathon v Intercom (CFI, 28 January 2026)

Date	28 January 2026
Court	CFI
Division	Milan (IT) Local Division
Type of action	Infringement Action
Case number(s)	UPC_CFI_727/2024
Registry reference	UPC_CFI_727/2024and493/2025
Parties	Agathon AG v. Intercom s.r.l.,KNARR Vertriebs GmbH

Official decision (PDF) · UPC registry entry

Dhenne Avocats represents claimants and defendants in European patent disputes before the Unified Patent Court, including the Paris divisions.

Contact the firm

Dhenne Avocats · 10 October 2026

Our analysis

Summary

By an order of 28 January 2026 issued after the interim conference (UPC_CFI_727/2024 and UPC_CFI_493/2025), the judge-rapporteur of the Milan Local Division set the framework for the oral hearing in Agathon v Intercom and KNARR Vertriebs. The order records the parties’ agreement on the test for infringement by equivalence, allows KNARR, which has not brought a counterclaim for revocation, to address validity at the hearing, and sets the value of each of the two actions at EUR 500,000. It shows the interim conference doing its job: fixing the scope of the debate before the hearing.

Question

How should the interim conference deal with the examination of auxiliary requests, the debate on equivalence, a co-defendant’s participation in the validity debate and the value of the dispute?

Decision

The auxiliary requests, being conditional, will be examined only if the counterclaim for revocation succeeds, in the order in which they are numbered. The parties adopt the equivalence test of Plant-e v Arkyne (The Hague, 22 November 2024), supplementary notes confined to that issue are allowed under Rule 36, without any preliminary view on infringement. KNARR may address validity at the hearing, without any change to its procedural role and without new arguments. The value is set at EUR 500,000 for each action, subject to reconsideration at the end of the hearing, which is listed for 24 March 2026.

Key points for practice

A co-defendant that has not challenged the patent may, with the parties’ agreement, address validity at the hearing without its procedural role being altered.
Agreement on an equivalence test taken from another division allows supplementary pleadings to be confined to that single issue.

Provisions applied

Rules of Procedure: Rules 30.1, 36, 105.5 and 106
Case law cited: Plant-e v Arkyne, The Hague Local Division, 22 November 2024, *** v OrthoApnea, Brussels Local Division, 17 January 2025, order UPC_CFI_479/2025, The Hague Local Division, 11 September 2025, UPC_CFI_471/2023, Mannheim Local Division, 6 June 2025, UPC_CFI_363/2024, Paris Local Division, 1 August 2025

Prepared by Dhenne Avocats from the official decision, consulted on 10 October 2026. The database is updated every week, on Friday. Only the official text is authoritative.

Decisions in the same proceedings

AGATHON AG v INTERCOM And KNARR VERTRIEBS (CFI, 2026-05-05), 5 May 2026

Going further

Lexicon: Patent infringement action.

Publications by Matthieu Dhenne: Pleading the Long Arm: What a UPC Statement of Claim Must Carry Beyond Jurisdiction (Kluwer Patent Blog).

Source and translations

Official source: Unified Patent Court registry link recorded in the record
Original language: not recorded
Translation available: no translation recorded the firm’s French record is a summary, not a translation
Date checked: not recorded

Only the official text is authoritative. A machine translation is never presented as official, republishing a third-party document requires a verified basis in rights, and a link to the source is preferred.

Follow this case

Proceedings, related decisions, appeals, parties and patents as recorded in the registry and in the Dhenne Avocats corpus. Each link states its source.

Proceedings

UPC_CFI_727/2024 official number

Follow this case

Parties

claimantAgathon AG2 decisions in the corpus Follow this party
defendantIntercom s.r.lFollow this party
defendantKNARR Vertriebs GmbHFollow this party

Exact name as it appears in the record, group affiliation only where sourced and dated.

Decisions in the same proceedings and documented appeals

No other decision in the corpus bears the same case number, and no appeal is documented in the corpus to date.

What the record states

Nature of the act: Infringement Action
Outcome (Dhenne Avocats summary): Les requêtes subsidiaires ne seront examinées que si la demande reconventionnelle en nullité aboutit. Le codéfendeur KNARR peut plaider sur la validité sans changer de rôle procédural. La valeur de chaque action est fixée à 500 000 EUR.
Appeal: No appeal documented in the corpus, this does not mean that no appeal was lodged.
Instance: First-instance decision, whether it has become final is not recorded.

Related decisions cited in the analyses

Agathon v Intercom (CFI, 5 May 2026) cited in this record
*** v OrthoApnea (CFI, 17 January 2025) cited in this record
Plant-e Knowledge v Arkyne Technologies (CFI, 22 November 2024) cited in this record

Scope: Dhenne Avocats corpus. Registry-based links are marked “official number”; links derived from the analyses are marked as such. An erroneous link can be withdrawn without deleting any record.

Receive an alert

Weekly summary of new records and substantive updates matching what you follow. Address confirmed by email, unsubscribe at any time, one email per week even where several of your follows match.