“Obey the Law” Injunctions

As noted previously on EPLaw and on ip fray, on February 14 the UPC Court of Appeal in Abbott Diabetes Care Inc. v. Sibio Technology Ltd., UPC_CoA_382/2024, reversed the Hague Local Division and ordered a preliminary injunction in favor of Abbott, the owner of  EP 3,831,283 ("Analyte Sensor Devices, Connections, and Methods").  Among the issues presented were whether the claim in suit included “added matter” and whether Abbott had filed its application for interim relief sufficiently quickly to demonstrate urgency.   I will pass over these issues for now, however, and note instead that toward the end of the decision, the Court of Appeal also addresses a question relating to the form of the injunction, stating in paragraph 158:

Abbott has requested leave to change the claim in case the Court of Appeal would consider a request to issue an injunction in general terms to be inadmissible. Other than in its separately filed request, in its Statement of appeal Abbott seems to make the request dependent on the situation where an auxiliary request must be relied on. Even if the request is to be considered unrelated to the auxiliary requests, as Abbott suggested at the oral hearing, there is no need to decide on this request. There is no need to rely on an auxiliary request and contrary to Sibionics’ argument, Abbott's request for a general injunction is admissible. The need for a limitation of the issued injunction to the specific infringing products cannot be inferred from Art. 62(1) UPCA. The scope of the general injunction requested by Abbott – which always has to be interpreted in the light of the reasoning underlying the order whereby the injunction is issued – is sufficiently clear, and not too broad. There is also no need to decide whether Abbott was allowed to add a request for repayment, since – as will be explained below – this request must be rejected.

As Florian Mueller notes in a more recent post on ip fray, “in the United States such ‘obey the law’ injunctions are routinely overturned,” citing my May 16, 2022 blog post on a Federal Circuit decision addressing this issue.  And in fact, this is an issue I will be discussing, albeit briefly, in my forthcoming book Remedies in Intellectual Property Law, where I note others scholars’ work suggesting, inter alia, that courts in Canada, China, and the U.K. generally permit such “obey the law” injunctions, whereas courts in France and Japan tend to be more specific.  Relevant to this topic, I should note as well that I recently came across an article by two judges of the Shanghai No. 3 Intermediate People’s Court, addressing Chinese practice relating to this issue and recommending some reforms.  See Tao Guandgong and Zhang Lu, Enforcement Practice of Cessation of Infringement in Patent Infringement Disputes and Review from a Judicial Perspective, China Pats. & Trademarks, No. 1, 2025, pp. 37-46.  The authors state that, in Chinese patent infringement actions, typically “the main body of a civil judgment . . . just simply orders an infringer to cease infringement in general terms, without specifying the way of cessation.”  When the defendant fails to comply with a judgment, the patentee can request compulsory enforcement from the enforcement division, but that entity is often at a disadvantage, in terms of knowing precisely what to order.  In this regard, the authors suggest that the enforcement division “communicate with the parties concerned, as well as the trial judge, in a bid to further clarify what needs to be enforced,” e.g., “the infringing acts to be stopped, forms of infringement, storage location of the infringing products, specialized molds, etc.,” and also recommend the establishment of a technical support system to assist the enforcement division.