The deadline for filing comments in the public consultation on the Rules of Procedure for the Unified Patent Court is tomorrow (1 October). IPcopy, amongst others, has kindly been presented with an advance copy of the IP Federation’s comments. The full 13 page response can be found here but a brief summary of the comments can be found below.

The IP Federation’s comments are quite wide ranging and cover the following topics:

• Procedural appeals
• Amendment of patents. The IP Federation is concerned there is inadequate basis for amendment of patents. Proposed tweaks to rule 30.1(a) and rule 313.2 are proposed
• Stays of proceedings. The rules here are regarded as requiring “tightening up”. In particular rules 295, 118 and 70.3 are flagged for attention
• Bifurcation. A hot topic this one and a substantial list of criteria to be added to rule 37 is suggested
• Opt outs. The IP Federation do not believe there should be a fee to opt out of the system and if there is a fee is should be a low level admin fee. It is noted thatt eh absence of a fee would allow applications to proceed directly to the Register and presumably avoid the “sunrise” issue. Rule 5.9 is regarded as ultra vires
• The IP Federation disagrees with the Rules Committee that the provisions of Artile 83 are clear. The siutation with regard to SPCs is also flagged
• There are five detailed observations on Court fees although it is acknowledged that this is outside the scope of the Rules Committee’s sphere of influence

The above points are just some of the comments in the submission which we will be reading more thoroughly with interest!

[Update: the IP Federation website is now carrying the comments document and this can be found at this link]

Mark Richardson  20 September 2013