On Friday 22 January 2016, the annual ERA (Academy of European Law) conference on the Unitary Patent took place in Brussels. Regarding the agreement reached on the renewal fees, Clemens Heusch, head of European litigation at Nokia, explained that although Nokia currently has more than 30,000 (!) patent families in its patent portfolio, he finds…
On 19 October 2015 the Preparatory Committee of the UPC has adopted the final 18th draft of the Rules of Procedure (RoP) of the Unified Patent Court. This means that the Committee ends its work regarding the Rules of Procedure. There is only one subject that still needs to be included in the RoP and…
Since the dismissal by the Court of Justice of the European Union of Spain’s actions on 5 May 2015 a number of positive decisions are coming from the unitary patent / UPC scene: 1) By the end of May, Italy had announced to be willing to become a “unitary patent member state”. Last week the…
In March 2015 the European Patent Office presented two proposals to the Select Committee for the level of renewal fees of the future Unitary Patent. The proposals were presented as the “Top 4” and “Top 5” models, i.e. equivalent to the national renewal fees of the 4, respectively 5 Member States where European patents are…
The European patent community and especially the people involved in the preparation of the Unified Patent Court were stirred up in March 2015 by an action launched before the Belgian Constitutional Court. On 10 March 2015 the Belgian non for profit association ESOMA (European Software Market Association) had launched a nullity action against the Belgian…
Sighs of relief… sighs of disappointment… Depending on your position towards the unitary patent package, one of the aforementioned sighs was heaved on Tuesday, when the CJEU dismissed the annulment actions of Spain against the Council Regulation 1257/2012 (“Unitary Patent Regulation”) and Council Regulation 1260/2012 (“Translation Regulation”) of the so-called unitary patent package. Irrespective of…
Recently, a number of European IP law professors (and certain lawyers) signed a motion against the EU patent package. The motion mentions 29 signatories of which 13 originate from Belgium. The other signatories are located in France (5), Italy (4), UK (2), Suisse (1), Portugal (1), the Netherlands (1), Sweden (1) and Spain (1). The…
The first actions of Spain and Italy against the decision of 25 EU member states to use the system of “enhanced cooperation” for the unitary patent package were rejected by the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) on 16 April 2013. One month earlier, Spain had launched on 22 March 2013 two new…
Since last week the prototype of the case management and efiling software for the Unified Patent Court is online for testing purposes. In Brussels, Paul Van Beukeringen (chairman of the preparatory committee) explained today that the purpose of the testing is to get as much feedback as possible from users on how this case management…
This week the Preparatory Committee of the Unified Patent Court gathered at the Finnish Permanent Representation to the European Union for their sixth meeting. At this meeting the Committee approved a shortlist of suitable candidate judges that have the potential to become a judge of the UPC. As you know, the UPC will need both…
