Last week, we reported on the challenging endeavour to set up Patent Translate, the machine translation system which is under joint development by the European Patent Organisation (EPO) and Google and which is a crucial element of the Unitary Patent (UP) package. Intellectual Property Office (IPO) officials from Hungary, Finland and the Czech Republic told…
The German ratification of the Unified Patent Court Agreement will most likely be decisive for the moment when the Unified Patent Court comes into existence. In an interview on recent developments regarding the UPC, Bird & Bird partner Wouter Pors told Kluwer IP Law that the Preparatory Committee and Member States are in contact to…
For Europeans who don’t speak English, German or French, the three official Unitary Patent (UP) languages, the future UP system will bring about an even more radical change than for those that do. Over the years, millions of patents from companies all over the world will have been held valid in their territory, although these…
Time is closing in on two of the most hotly debated issues of the Unitary Patent (UP) package: the level of the UP renewal fees and the distribution key for the partition of these fees between participating Member States. Work on the latter, politically highly sensitive, issue was launched at the 10th meeting of the…
The Preparatory Committee of the Unified Patent Court (UPC) is very satisfied with the opinion of the Advocate General (AG) of the European Court of Justice (CJEU) on the Spanish challenge. As chairman Paul van Beukering commented to Kluwer IP Law, ‘It couldn’t be much better than this.’ According to Van Beukering, the recent opinion…
There are no disadvantages to the Unitary Patent package, as it is an optional system. Willem Hoyng, lawyer of Hoyng Monegier and member of the Legal and the Expert Panel of the UPC Preparatory Committee, wrote this in a paper made available to Kluwer IP News. If companies don’t want to put all their eggs…
Member States of the UPC Agreement reported on the national ratification processes during the 7th meeting of the UPC Preparatory Committee on 4 November 2014 in Brussels. According to the Preparatory Committee the situation looks promising since many Member States reported they hope to be able to ratify the UPCA in the course of 2015….
As part of their training, the first group of some 25 candidate Unified Patent Court (UPC) judges will follow internships at specialized patent courts, such as those in the UK, Germany, France and the Netherlands. Paul van Beukering, Chairman of the Preparatory Committee for the UPC, told Kluwer IP Law that various options are currently…
The 17th Draft Rules of Procedure for the Unified Patent Court have been published on 3 November on the website of the Unified Patent Court. A hearing on the new Draft is planned for 26 November 2014 at the European Law Academy (ERA) in Trier. The meeting will be open to some 200 experts from…
‘When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.’ At the EU Patent Package Congress in Brussels, organized on 17 October by the universities of Antwerp en Louvain attended by Kluwer IP Law, several speakers tackled the issue: is the creation of a specialized court for patent litigation necessarily positive? For companies…
