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On the 13th June 2013, the Licensing Executives Society of Britain and Ireland held a meeting entitled “Europe’s New Unified Patent Court – for better or for worse?“. The meeting was chaired by the Rt. Hon. Professor Sir Robin Jacob and included a number of distinguished speakers associated with the world of IP: Richard Vary (Head of Litigation at Nokia), Arnaud Michel (Gide Loyrette Nouel), Alan Johnson (Bristows) and Ian Wood (Charles Russell). Oh, and me (so an 80% distinguished speaking panel then).
The meeting covered a number of aspects of the proposed Unitary Patent system (or “A European Tragedy” as Sir Robin Jacob put it). My presentation is attached below along with a brief overview of my slides.
The outline for my presentation is as follows:
- How to get a unitary patent, e.g. where it sits in the current prosecution/validation process
- “Fudge” image – no idea how that got in there! It, in no way, represents all the “compromises” in the unitary patent package….honest!
- Territorial coverage
- Brief (very brief!) recap of regulations/agreement
- Map based walkthrough of which countries are in and out of the regulations/agreement, leading into
- Number of countries required to start system/who is out/ who might join
- Changing territorial coverage
- Costs
- Pre-grant/post-grant costs. New fees to consider
- Available details on fee levels
- UP versus EP versus national patents
- UP – Pros and Cons
- Alternatives to UP – “classical EP patents” or national patents/beware PCT national phase trap
- Translation language provisions (including a “Have I Got News for You” style look at the translation issue. Which one is the odd one out from: The Tardis’ translation matrix, a Babel fish, a Star Trek universal translator or the “high quality” machine translations referred to in the unitary patent translation regulation. Answers in the comments section below please!)
- What do I (a patent owner) need to do now?
Speakers’ biographies can be found here.
Mark Richardson 17 June 2013
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