After a year of stagnation concerning the Unitary Patent project, chairman Alexander Ramsay of the UPC Preparatory Committee has published a year end message on the committee’s website. The message makes clear that despite the expected and unexpected “hurdles” of the Brexit and the German constitutional complaint against the ratification of the UPCA, which “call…
“If I listen to [judge rapporteur in the case against the Unified Patent Court Agreement] Peter Huber and the German Constitutional Court (FCC) rules at the end of March, I have the optimistic view the ruling will be a positive one.” Alexander Ramsay, chairman of the UPC Preparatory Committee, has said this in an interview…
The constitutional complaint holding up the start of the Unified Patent Court will be decided upon in the first quarter of next year. Justice Peter Huber of the German Federal Constitutional Court (FCC), who is overseeing case 2 BvR 739/17, has said this in an exclusive interview with Managing IP. Huber added that the time…
The Dutch authorities have handed over to the European Medicines Agency (EMA) its new premises, located in the Zuidas business area of Amsterdam. On 15 November EMA’s Executive Director Guido Rasi ‘signed the lease agreement and thanked the Dutch authorities for reaching this important milestone on time’, according to a report on the EMA website. EU…
The jurisprudence of the Court of Justice for the European Union is not excluding the possibility to allow a non-EU Member State forming part of the UPCA. This is one of the conclusions in ‘EU Patent and Brexit’, a research paper which was requested by the European Parliament’s Committee on Legal Affairs and commissioned, overseen…
Despite all uncertainty regarding the future, due to the ongoing Brexit saga and the German constitutional complaint, preparations for the Unitary Patent system are quietly going on. The EPO Select Committee gathered information on national measures accompanying the implementation of the system which was distributed among members of the Committee this summer. Also, the epi…
‘Why Berlin can’t wait for Brexit in matters of UPC’, is the title of a recent article on the website of the German law firm Kather Augenstein. Main point: if the Federal Constitutional Court dismisses the constitutional complaint against the Unified Patent Court Agreement, the German government will have to finish the ratification procedure immediately,…
Of the mainstream UK political parties, only the Liberal Democratic Party is overtly “Remain”. It has just launched its EU Parliamentary Election campaign with the somewhat surprising slogan “Bollocks to Brexit”. From an IP lawyer’s perspective, this raises an amusing question of whether copyright could subsist in such a slogan, because if so, the LibDems…
It seems to be a more and more realistic scenario that the UK may leave the European Union on March 29, 2019 without an agreement. A lot has been written about the effect of such a “hard Brexit” on trade in general and –more interesting to us working in the patent field- on the future…
It is often said that ‘tomorrow never comes’. Likewise, a recurring theme for some years has been that ‘the UPC will start next year’. As 2019 is now well under way, it is time to consider whether this year we can be more optimistic than this, and how the turmoil in the UK Parliament affects…
