The European Patent Office has revoked a DivX streaming patent that the Unified Patent Court upheld only weeks earlier. According to JUVE Patent, which reported the outcome on 20 October 2026, the Opposition Division revoked EP 4 213 033 — a patent the EPO’s own publication server records as “Video distribution system including progressive playback”, proprietor DivX, LLC of San Diego, inventor Roland Osborne, granted on 7 May 2025 from application 23156805.6. The claims cover progressive playback of media held on remote servers, including client-side management of byte-range requests and trickplay functions such as fast-forward, rewind and skipping inside a stream. DivX can appeal the revocation to the Technical Boards of Appeal.
The contrast with the court is stark. On 15 September 2026 the second panel of the UPC’s Munich local division — presiding judge Daniel Voß, with legally qualified judges Georg Werner and Tatyana Zhilova and technically qualified judge Torsten Duhme — dismissed Netflix’s counterclaim for revocation and upheld EP 033 as granted (UPC_CFI_465/2025 and UPC_CFI_1121/2025). The panel held the cited prior art, including several US streaming applications, neither anticipated nor rendered the invention obvious, and that the skilled person had no motivation to combine the references. On infringement it found Netflix’s streaming software, including the integrated Cadmium player, indirectly infringes claim 1 because the software is objectively suitable to carry out the patented method. The court issued an injunction across 18 UPC member states, ordered five Netflix entities — among them Netflix Inc., Netflix International B.V. and the German, Italian and French subsidiaries — to provide information and render accounts, and declared Netflix liable for damages from 7 May 2025, the grant date. Penalties were set at a minimum of €5,000 a day for breaching the injunction and €250 a day for breaching the information and accounting orders. Netflix has appealed (UPC-COA-177/2026).
What this changes
The headline lesson is about a date, not a doctrine. EP 033 was granted on 7 May 2025, and the notice printed on every B1 specification gives any person nine months from publication of the mention of grant to oppose — here, 7 February 2026. Netflix was already in litigation over this patent and still had to be inside that window to reach the EPO. A revocation counterclaim at the UPC is available for as long as the infringement action runs, which makes it tempting to treat the opposition deadline as optional. It is not the same remedy. The UPC decides validity for the patent in the UPC states before it; the Opposition Division revokes the European patent centrally, with effect from the start, in every state it covers — including the EPC countries that are not in the UPC system at all, such as Spain, Poland, the United Kingdom, Switzerland and Turkey. On the EP 033 specification that designation list runs to more than thirty states. Letting the nine months lapse because a counterclaim is already on file trades a central remedy for a regional one.
For docketing, the harder point is that the clock restarts. EP 033 is a divisional: the specification lists four earlier applications under Article 76 EPC, reaching back to 08705745.1, and the family’s filing date is 7 January 2008 with January 2007 US priority. One member of that chain, EP 3 467 666, was revoked by the Opposition Division in 2023 for impermissible extension, a decision JUVE reports the Boards of Appeal upheld and which the Enlarged Board declined to review on DivX’s petition in August 2026. Another, EP 2 661 696, lost its appeal before the German Federal Court of Justice in September 2025. Knocking out the parent did not end the exposure; it moved to a divisional filed in 2023 and granted in 2025, whose own opposition window opened fresh. Anyone monitoring a competitor’s rights at patent level rather than family level will miss those windows. The watch item is the Article 76 chain and every grant that issues from it.
The second operational point is what an EPO revocation is actually worth on the day it arrives: nothing yet. Article 106(1) EPC gives an appeal suspensive effect, so while DivX’s appeal to the Technical Boards is pending, EP 033 remains in force and the Munich injunction, the €5,000-a-day penalty and the accounting orders remain enforceable. A first-instance revocation is a stay argument before the UPC Court of Appeal, not a self-executing release. Treating it as a signal to resume a prohibited activity is how a daily penalty becomes a real liability.
The panel’s refusal to make enforcement conditional on security deserves attention from any defendant facing an elderly patent. Netflix asked for security; the court declined, reasoning in part that EP 033 expires in under 18 months and that requiring security could effectively deny DivX enforcement during the remaining term. Because a divisional inherits the parent’s filing date, the twenty-year term here runs out in January 2028. So the standard defence tactic — concede nothing, appeal, and insist the claimant post security — is weakest exactly where the right is close to expiry, and the remaining-term argument becomes an asset for a patentee holding a late-granted divisional. The same arithmetic explains the shape of the claim: a patent granted in May 2025 and expiring in January 2028 is not primarily an injunction, it is a damages window with cross-border accounting obligations attached to five corporate entities.
Finally, the split tells you where invalidity attacks on long divisional chains actually succeed. At the UPC, Netflix ran novelty and obviousness and lost on the motivation to combine. At the EPO, the ground that killed the earlier family member was impermissible extension — whether the amended claims were supported by what the original application disclosed. On a chain of four or more divisionals stretched over fifteen years, the amendment basis is usually the thinner ice, and it is a ground the EPO examines with a severity courts rarely match. A defendant building an invalidity case against a late divisional should be reading the priority document against each generation of claims before it invests in a prior-art combination, because the two forums are not weighing the same evidence. That work — an invalidity analysis framed for central revocation rather than for one court, supported by a litigation prior-art search — is what keeps the two tracks from producing opposite answers at your expense rather than the other side’s.
DivX was represented at the EPO by Eisenführ Speiser with Vienna firm Matschnig & Forsthuber, and at the UPC by Wildanger; Netflix by Quinn Emanuel Urquhart & Sullivan, per JUVE Patent.
Reported by PerspireIP from JUVE Patent’s account of the EPO and UPC decisions, the EPO publication server record for EP 4 213 033 B1, and Article 106 EPC.