全球知识产权每日洞察 — 2026-06-02

Opinion

On the occasion of the UPC’s third birthday, we’ve produced a podcast that should go live this week. And in recognition of the notoriety of the UPC in worldwide patent litigation circles, we’ll now stop providing the full-length name. We’ll just write UPC without explaining it because everyone in this field knows it.

What the UPC has accomplished is remarkable. The judges and all court staff deserve the greatest respect for what they have put in place.

That, however, does not mean that one should wear rose-tinted glasses all the time. It’s important to face the facts. There is no question that the UPC is here to stay, but it’s not all going great. I want the UPC to succeed. We are, however, also all in on Brazil; we have four contributors from Asia; and I’ve traditionally been extremely interested in U.S. cases.

Stagnation

By Kevin Mack, President, Via Licensing Alliance

As streaming cements itself as the primary engine of global entertainment, the industry’s focus is shifting. What once were framed as “content wars” are increasingly giving way to deeper questions about the intellectual property that underpins streaming itself. The IP that enables streaming technologies has moved from the background to the forefront, both as a central topic of industry conversation and as a focal point in litigation and licensing activity across the IP ecosystem.

That shift is unsurprising given the scale that streaming has now achieved. Global video streaming revenues have grown to approximately $175 billion annually, surpassing the combined revenues of the recorded music and theatrical film industries and rivaling the size of the entire global video game market.

Streaming is no longer an emerging distribution model or an incremental revenue stream; it is one of the world’s most significant entertainment businesses. With that scale comes a renewed spotlight on the technologies that made it possible in the first place.

The ubiquity of streaming did not happen by accident. It is the product of decades of sustained investment in research and development. Patentees who contributed to these foundational technologies are not seeking compensation as a mere transactional “fee”, but as part of a larger reinvestment cycle. That cycle is what funds continued advances in data efficiency and video fidelity, which remain essential as consumer expectations and technical demands continue to rise.

Context:

Silimed Indústria de Implantes Ltda., a Brazilian manufacturer of silicone implants, had a distribution and cooperation arrangement with Polytech Health & Aesthetics GmbH, a German company that acted as its distributor and worked with it on obtaining CE marking for implants in Europe. That cooperation ran from 1995 until 2008.After it ended, Polytech filed European Patent No.

EP2581193 B1

(“Process for the manufacture of implants or intermediate products of such implants as well as implants and intermediate products obtained by such process”). The Oberlandesgericht Frankfurt (Frankfurt Higher Regional Court, OLG Frankfurt) later found that the invention belonged to Silimed and had been developed by Silimed employees who shared the relevant know-how with Polytech during the parties’ collaboration.

Silimed sued in 2017 seeking transfer of the patent, accounting information, and a declaration of damages. After more than seven years of litigation, including a remand by the Bundesgerichtshof (Federal Court of Justice, BGH) in July 2022, the OLG Frankfurt issued a vindication judgment on November 28, 2024 (case No. 6 U 79/19), ordering Polytech to transfer the patent and provide accounting information. The BGH dismissed Polytech’s petition for review on December 16, 2025 (case No. X ZR 111/24), making the judgment final.

What does the name Marshall Phelps mean to you? To the intellectual property world, it is the reason IP is on the corporate map. He not only helped save IBM from bankruptcy and enabled Microsoft to make friends across the industry, but he also completely changed the way top management and board executives think about IP worldwide.

“I remember a time when I would walk around conferences, and I was viewed as a demigod because I had come up with this, but it was no big deal,” he says in an exclusive interview with

ip fray

. “It’s just what we did. I think the world is a better place if it figures out how to cooperate than if it doesn’t.”

Mr. Phelps eventually said goodbye to the IP monetization world in 2009. Since then, he has spent a lot of time in academia, teaching at

Context:

Google recently filed a petition for a writ of certiorari with the Supreme Court of the United States (SCOTUS), asking it to decide if the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) has statutory authority to deny patent validity challenges on a “settled expectations” basis (

April 28, 2026

ip fray

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