Jaguar Land Rover now has 24 hours to destroy the BYD documents it fought to seize. Every hour past that deadline costs €50,000.
That is the order from Judge H.F.R. van Heemstra of the District Court of The Hague, issued November 11. It caps the penalty at €500,000, roughly $556,000, and takes effect immediately. JLR cannot sit on the files and wait out an appeal.
The material came from an August raid. Court-appointed bailiffs, acting on an order JLR requested, entered BYD’s Dutch offices in Schiedam and Hoofddorp and walked out with Ti7 launch plans, technical data and financial records.
For a legacy brand trying to keep a Chinese rival off its turf, that was a rare look inside the house: launch timing, engineering, money. Now it all has to go back or into the shredder.
The judge’s reasoning cuts deeper than the deadline. Van Heemstra found JLR never needed the files to argue that the Ti7 copies the Defender’s exterior. A design claim lives on the sheet metal, and the sheet metal is public.
Damages didn’t justify the grab either. BYD hasn’t sold the Ti7 in the European Union, so there are no European sales to calculate losses against.
BYD called the seizure an overreach that swept up unrelated R&D material, and the court agreed the request was too broad. It also rejected JLR’s separate bid for a surprise inspection of BYD’s internal files. Any further enforcement under the original seizure order is now barred.
Strip away the legal language and the picture is plain. JLR went looking for more than it needed, and a Dutch court noticed.
None of this clears the Ti7. “The ruling lifts the evidence seizure but does not decide whether the SUV infringes JLR’s intellectual property rights,” van Heemstra wrote.
The core accusation stands, with separate proceedings in Rotterdam and The Hague set to decide whether the Ti7 copies the Defender’s design. JLR’s wider case goes further. It claims BYD dismantled a Defender to reverse-engineer its technology.
That second claim is the one with teeth. Boxy proportions and a squared-off tail can be argued in circles for years. A teardown allegation is different, and it’s exactly where internal technical files would carry weight.
That’s why this procedural loss stings more than its label suggests. JLR had those files in hand. Now a judge says they were taken without sufficient cause and must be returned or erased.
The timing tells its own story. The Defender is one of the few JLR products that prints money, and its blocky silhouette is the brand’s most recognizable asset. BYD, meanwhile, is pushing into Europe with a lineup broad enough to make old assumptions about who copies whom look dated.
JLR chose an aggressive way to protect that silhouette: a court-backed raid on a competitor’s offices. The court has now told it the raid went too far, and put a running meter on the cleanup.
The design fight moves on in Rotterdam and The Hague. The Ti7 still isn’t on sale in the EU. And JLR’s clock is already ticking.
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