A patent may be infringed when the claim including the characteristics of the patent has been reproduced.
But it may also happen that infringement is constituted by an equivalence of means. The court of appeal clarifies that this presupposes that “the patented item does not exercise a known function, the function of the item being defined as the action of providing, in its implementation, a primary technical purpose.”
Therefore, if the function is already known, it cannot result in infringement by equivalent means.
