The Paris judicial court, in a judgment dated May 30, 2024, dismissed the company System B, based in Changé (Mayenne), of the requests presented against Teckner and its subsidiary Ikomaa, from Pleucadeuc (Morbihan).
Sausage making
System B maintained that the machine Turbolinkproposed by its two competitors, used a process similar to its invention for the manufacture of sausages.
The SME demanded a provision of €70,000 in damages in addition to the ban on the sale of Turbolink.
Features disclosed
But the patent is void”,
the court ruled, because the machine Wheelinker was the subject of a patent application although its characteristics had previously been disclosed to the public by its manufacturer System B.
The patent was filed in December 2016, and issued in November 2018 by the European Patent Office.
At E. Leclerc
The machine had in fact been made available to the butcher shop of an E. Leclerc store in 2015 and, explains the judgment, it was thus revealed to butchers, to store management and possibly to material suppliers, all of whom were not bound by confidentiality on this subject. From then on, the new characteristics were made public and could no longer be protected by a patent.
The court therefore did not rule on the inventive character of the patent and on the existence of an infringement.
