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Unified Patent Court – News and June 2016 Update 2
This Thursday, 23 June 2016, is of course Referendum Day here in the UK, the outcome of which could have a significant impact on the unitary patent system. This Thursday also marks the day on which two bills relating to Germany’s ratification procedure for the UPCA will come before the German parliament. This hearing is apparently the first of three hearings. With the German Parliament due to take a summer break throughout most of July and August it may be the autumn before the necessary steps have been taken to ratify the UPCA in Germany. [German Parliament calendar; Draft Bill 1; Draft Bill 2] (more…)
Unitary Patent Package – The Ratification Game (Bulgaria completes its ratification formalities)
Update (7 June 2016)
According to the website of the Council of the European Union, Bulgaria has now deposited its instrument of ratification (on 3 June 2016) to become the tenth country to complete its ratification formalities. Bulgaria joins Finland, Portugal, Luxembourg, Malta, Denmark, Belgium, Sweden, France and Austria as one of the ten countries who have completed their ratification processes.
The unitary patent system requires 13 countries to ratify including the UK, France and Germany meaning that just the UK, Germany and one other country are required to ratify to bring the unitary patent system into effect. The target date for the unitary patent system is currently May 2017.
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EPO News: Update on Early Certainty (EC)
The “Early Certainty from Search” scheme (ECfS) was launched by the EPO in 2014 to “provide applicants with legal certainty in Europe on pending patent applications early in the process and also to contribute to overall timeliness”.
It is IPcopy’s understanding from EPO sources that the EPO is happy with how ECfS has developed and that there are now plans to extend this into examination and opposition. (more…)
Unified Patent Court – June 2016 Update
The first update in a while popped into IPcopy’s inbox today from the UK’S UPC Taskforce. This looks like it may be the last such official update for a few weeks as the UK will be “going dark” in the period before the EU Referendum. (Hopefully the first communication after the restart won’t begin “EU Referendum Result – Oops. The rest of you can take it from here, right?”!)
Anyway, back to the main news: (more…)
Logic and Proportion – Enfish and Resolving the Mysteries of Alice
The US software patent environment is very different in the year following Alice v. CLS than in the year after State Street v. Signature . It was expected that when the Supreme Court finally had to take a view on eligibility of subject matter, things would change. After years of waiting for the other shoe to drop, it did (in a strange multi-stage process involving Bilski v. Kappos, Mayo v. Prometheus and Alice) – but nobody seems terribly sure where it landed. (more…)
The only alternative to the EU is chaos? Brexit and trade marks/designs discussed at the CIPA Symposium
The European Council president Donald Tusk suggested recently that Brexit could bring chaos. Does this doom laden warning extend to the world of IP?
In an earlier post we covered the discussion at the CIPA Symposium on Brexit as it related to the unitary patent system (summary: Brexit probably won’t be good for the unitary patent). In this post we recap some of the issues discussed in the sessions on general legal implications of withdrawal from the EU, the impact on European trade marks and Community registered designs and some wider implications of Brexit. (more…)
“Pretty bad to very very bad” – Brexit and the UPC discussed at the CIPA Symposium
Newspapers reported last week that Christine Lagarde, the head of the IMF, regarded a vote to leave the EU as having “pretty bad to very, very bad consequences” for the UK. This view was echoed by four of the five panelists at the CIPA/IP Centrum Brexit Symposium on Thursday 12 May. The symposium, hosted by Gwilym Roberts, included a contribution from Kevin Mooney who has been heavily involved in preparations for the (hopefully) upcoming unitary patent system.
In this post IPcopy will take a look at the implications for the unitary patent system in the event of a vote to leave the EU. (more…)
Want to be a Judge at the UPC? Recruitment now open
The unitary patent system is moving towards launch with most people anticipating the start of operations to occur at some point next year. The Unified Patent Court is to comprise a registry, Court of First Instance and a Court of Appeal. The Court of First Instance will have a central division based in Paris, with sections in London and Munich, and a number of local and regional divisions spread through the Contracting Member States. The Court of Appeal will be in Luxembourg.
A court needs judges though and the UPC is now looking for applicants to recruit as both the legally qualified and technically qualified judges. The recruitment process is now open and the closing date is just under two months away on 4 July 2016. Vacancy notices can be found here (EN, FR, DE). (more…)
USPTO – Patent Subject Matter Eligibility – May 2016 Update
The USPTO has recently issued an update to their training materials and guidance on subject matter eligibility. The new materials, which may be found here, contain a memo to US patent Examiners and some more examples in the life sciences area. There is an open ended comment period for the general public to make comments about patent subject matter eligibility topics (comments may be sent to 2014_interim_guidance@uspto.gov and will be uploaded for viewing onto the USPTO website). (more…)
Searching patents in Japan, China, Chinese Taipei and Korea
Despite web browsers’ handy translate functions, it can still sometimes be hard to search for patents in other languages, particularly non-European languages which many of us won’t have a vast amount of experience with. It may have been that to get information about a Japanese patent, for example, one would have to email a Japanese attorney to source the information.
But no more! It seems some at the EPO might have been having a similar problem, and so the EPO’s Asian patent information services have put together a number of instruction guides on how to search patent databases in Japan, China, Chinese Taipei (also known as Taiwan) and Korea – without even the additional translation help of a browser. (more…)
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