InterDigital VC Holdings v The Walt Disney Company (CFI, 9 July 2025)

Date	9 July 2025
Court	CFI
Division	Mannheim (DE) Local Division
Type of action	Generic application
Registry reference	App_22463/2025 · ORD_24049/2025
Parties	The Walt Disney Company (Benelux) B.V.

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.

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Dhenne Avocats · 10 October 2026

Our analysis

Summary

By order of 9 July 2025 (UPC_CFI_292/2025, App_22463/2025), Florence Butin, President of the Court of First Instance, changed the language of InterDigital VC Holdings’ infringement action against eleven Disney companies before the Mannheim Local Division from German to English, the language in which EP 3 259 902 was granted. The application, filed by The Walt Disney Company (Benelux) on 13 May 2025, was joined by the other defendants.

Question

Should the language of proceedings be changed to the language of the patent where the claimant no longer maintains a reasoned objection?

Decision

Yes. Having consulted the claimant and the Local Division panel (Rule 323), the President noted that the claimant, referring to the orders made in the parallel proceedings, had not repeated its arguments, and that all defendants supported the application. The change is not made subject to any translation or interpretation arrangements, since the statement of claim was already available in English and a considerable share of the exhibits is in that language. An appeal lies within 15 days (Art. 73(2)(a) UPCA).

Key points for practice

Practical point: where the issue has already been decided in parallel proceedings between the same parties, the change of language is granted unconditionally if pleadings and exhibits already exist in English.

Provisions applied

Agreement on a Unified Patent Court: Arts 49(1), (2) and (5) and 73(2)(a)
Rules of Procedure: Rules 220 and 323
Case law cited: 10x Genomics v Curio Bioscience, 17 April 2024, Court of Appeal

Related decisions

The Walt Disney (Benelux), 2 May 2025, earlier order changing the language in parallel proceedings.
The Walt Disney (Benelux), 18 June 2025, order to the same effect in the parallel proceedings.

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.

Going further

Lexicon: Written procedure (UPC), Court fees and costs (UPC).

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

No case number recorded in this record.

Parties

claimantThe Walt Disney Company (Benelux) B.V.12 decisions in the corpus Follow 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: Generic application
Outcome (Dhenne Avocats summary): La langue de la procédure passe de l'allemand à l'anglais, langue de délivrance du brevet, sans condition de traduction, la demanderesse ne maintenant plus d'objection argumentée.
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.

Patents mentioned

EP 3 259 902 mentioned in: Dhenne Avocats analysis Follow this patent

Related decisions cited in the analyses

InterDigital CE Patent Holdings v The Walt Disney Company (CFI, 18 June 2025) cited in this record
InterDigital VC Holdings v The Walt Disney Company (CFI, 2 May 2025) cited in this record
Curio Bioscience v 10x Genomics (CoA, 17 April 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.

Patents and standards

Publication	Role in the dispute	Family	Standard and declaration	Pool	Sources
`EP 3 259 902`	Mentioned in the analysis (role not qualified)	not recorded	not recorded	not recorded	Espacenet links not checked mentioned in: Dhenne Avocats analysis

The statuses “asserted in litigation”, “declared essential”, “listed by a pool” and “essentiality examined by a court” are distinct and may coexist. Validity, infringement and technical essentiality are different questions. Scope: patents cited in the decisions of the Dhenne Avocats corpus, with no essentiality score or prediction.

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