The Unified Patent Court (UPC) is a planned future court common to EU Member States which participate in the Unitary Patent system, and it will be part of their judicial system. After a transitional period of 7 years or 14 years at most, it will have exclusive competence in respect of traditional European patents and European patents with unitary effect (Unitary Patents). The UPC is based on the Unified Patent Court Agreement. The Unitary Patent system and the UPC are planned to start functioning once certain ratification conditions have been fulfilled.
The Dutch company Philips is among the top-10 Patent Cooperation Treaty (PCT) applicants and the top-3 European Patent Convention (EPC) applicants. Owning about 64,000 patents and filing approximately 1,500 patent applications each year (with a strong focus on the growth areas of health and well-being), much is at stake for the company with the introduction…
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…
As the readers will know, on 18 November 2014, Advocate General Yves Bot published his conclusions in cases C-146/13 and C-147/13, whereby he has proposed that the Court of Justice of the European Union (“CJEU”) reject the nullity actions filed by the Kingdom of Spain against Regulation (EU) 1257/2012 (Enhanced cooperation) and 1260/2012 (Translation arrangements)…
Literature and litigation go hand in hand. My fellow contributors aptly illustrated this, their recent posts moving to the cadence of the language of Shakespeare and Montesquieu. To follow their footsteps, but on a more contemporary note on a future (some suggest: fantasy) subject: “Brace yourselves, Winter is coming.” Well, Winter is not coming. At…
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 newly established 15th Patent Senate of the Appeals Court of Düsseldorf (Presiding Judge Dr. Ulrike Voß) has referred a number of questions concerning the calculation of damages in IP cases to the European Court of Justice. This opens the floor for the ECJ to talk about damages, as far as I know for 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…
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…
