Search English translations of selected German patent decisions published with official court headnotes.

Many UPC judges previously served as judges at German national patent courts. As the UPC operates on substantive legal concepts that are in many respects similar to those applied under German patent law, German national case law may — depending on the circumstances of the individual case — provide useful guidance for future UPC proceedings and decisions.

For around 150 years, patent law decisions from Germany’s highest courts — and for approximately 75 years also from regional and higher regional courts — have been published together with authoritative guiding principles written or approved by the deciding judges (“amtlicher Leitsatz”). The total body of such published decisions likely ranges in the low to mid four-digit area.
These official headnotes summarize the legal aspects of a case which, in the court’s own view, are of importance beyond the individual dispute. This database therefore focuses exclusively on decisions that German courts themselves considered sufficiently significant to merit publication with an official headnote.

The collection currently focuses on decisions issued from approximately 2020 onwards. Earlier German patent decisions are generally not included.

The translations provided here are lightly curated machine translations. They have not been fully reviewed for linguistic or substantive accuracy, and no responsibility is assumed for the correctness of any translation. Their purpose is to provide international, and particularly English-speaking, users with accessible insight into the development of German patent jurisprudence relevant to the UPC environment.