UPC Court of Appeal: Gucci's Own Wallet Anticipates Most of Agfa's Leather Printing Patent
The Court of Appeal of the Unified Patent Court (UPC) has handed Gucci a clear win in its long dispute with Agfa over printing on natural leather. In a decision dated 21 October 2026 (UPC_CoA_582/2025 and related cases), the court revoked most of Agfa's patent and confirmed that Gucci's products do not infringe the claims that survive.
The patent
Agfa's European Patent EP 3 388 490 covers a method of decorating natural leather. A base coat containing a pigment for an achromatic colour other than black is applied first. A colour image is then printed with UV curable inkjet inks. Agfa sued nine Gucci companies in 2023, claiming that leather goods in Gucci's Pikarar collection were made using the method.
The Hamburg Local Division dismissed both the infringement action and Gucci's counterclaims for revocation in April 2025. Both sides appealed.
Gucci's own product as prior art
Gucci argued that its "Flora" range, including a wallet made and sold before the patent's April 2017 filing date, already used the claimed method. The Court of Appeal agreed. Analytical reports using microscopy, infrared spectroscopy, gas chromatography, mass spectrometry and Raman spectroscopy showed that a skilled person could detect the base coat and the pigmented UV curable inks by examining the wallet.
Two headnotes worth remembering
The court laid down two principles on public prior use of manufacturing methods:
- A manufacturing method behind a publicly used product is made available to the public under Article 54(2) EPC if, at the relevant date, a skilled person could work out the method without undue burden by analysing the product's composition. There is no extra requirement that the skilled person must have a particular reason to analyse the product.
- The skilled person must be able to use the claimed method based on the product and their common general knowledge, but features that are not part of the claimed invention do not need to be reproducible.
What survived
Independent claims 1, 10, 14 and 15 and several dependent claims were found not new and were revoked for Belgium, France, Germany, Italy and Sweden. Claim 5 (in combination with claim 1), claim 9 on heat pressing, and claims 6 to 8 as dependent on claim 5 were upheld.
The court also read "achromatic colour" more broadly than Hamburg had. It noted that warm whites are common in luxury leather goods. Even so, Agfa had not proved that Gucci's inks contained polyfunctional monomers or oligomers in the range required by claim 5, so the infringement appeal failed. Agfa must bear the full costs at both instances. The value of the appeal proceedings was set at EUR 2.5 million.
Why it matters
The decision is important for any company that holds process patents. A product sold before the filing date can destroy the novelty of the process used to make it, provided that modern analysis can reveal the process without undue effort. Companies should keep good records of their own earlier products, because those records may be the strongest defence when a competitor's patent arrives.
Sources
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