Home » Patents (Page 44)
Category Archives: Patents
Unified Patent Court Rules of Procedure Consultation – Submissions Round-up
Updated: Two further consultation submissions added 18 November
Following our recent posts highlighting some of the various rules of procedure consultation submissions that have come to light, more have popped up online. For your ease of reference we thought we’d pull together links to all the submissions we’ve seen in one place. If anyone has come across other submissions then please let us know and we’ll add them to the post.
Unified Patent Court – Referendum in Denmark
Denmark are to hold a referendum on 25 May 2014 as to whether to proceed with ratifying and joining the unified patent court. The EUObserver article also suggests that two groups within the Danish parliament are blocking the consitutional majority required.
Ireland are also due to have a referendum on the UPC. Although this was due to take place with two other referenda this year it now appears that the patents referendum in Ireland has been delayed until 2014.
Currently only Austria has ratified the UPC Agreement.
Mark Richardson 2 October 2013
Unified Patent Court Rules of Procedure Consultation – Bird & Bird Comments
After yesterday’s post about the Rules of Procedure consultation comments from the IP Federation comes news of Bird & Bird’s own response.
The full submission can be accessed here. Highlights of the submission were detailed in the email that popped into IPcopy’s Inbox a few minutes ago and these are reproduced below.
Unified Patent Court Rules of Procedure Consultation – IP Federation Comments
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 UPC Rules of Procedure: Apple, Google and Samsung join forces!
IPcopy was very interested to read AmeriKat’s excellent post on IPKat about the joint letter that Apple, Google and Samung (amongst others) have sent to the Member States of the European Union, Members of the European Parliament, the European Commission and the Preparatory Committee of the Unified Patent Court. The letter which was sent to the New York Times (see NY Times article here) notes that “an effective and balanced unitary patent system has the potential to decrease the costs of obtaining patent protection, increase European competitiveness, and support the long-term growth of innovative industries in Europe and abroad”.
The letter then goes on however to raise two major concerns with the Rules of Procedure (15th Draft here), namely bifurcation and injunctions.
I Am the Law – I Am a UPC Judge
As the UPC judge arrived in court the problem of bifurcation suddenly didn’t seem worth worrying about (Image from Flickr under cc licence/Mooshuu)
The Preparatory Committee for the Unified Patent Court has recently launched expression of interests of candidate judges at the UPC. As noted in the cover text the Committee adopted its detailed roadmap back in June this year and one priority of the roadmap was to help the nomination process of the first group of judges and to ensure the organisation of training of candidate judges. The call for expression of interest can be found here and the rules of the pre-selection procedure here. The closing date for the call of interest is 15 November 2013 so if you are interested you haven’t got that much time to send your applications to Mr Paul van Beukering (Chairman of the Preparatory Committee).
India & the section 8 ‘trap’: Would you like a side order of red tape with your red tape?
IPcopy has previously looked at the stringent disclosure obligations that a patent applicant has to contend with during the patent application procedure in India. However, recent decisions in the Intellectual Property Appellate Board (IPAB) have indicated that those disclosure obligations may be even more stringent than previously thought.
What’s going on with the Intellectual Property Bill?
Parliamentary copyright images are reproduced with the permission of Parliament
In an earlier series of posts (see here) we covered the various aspects of the Intellectual Property Bill as it was initially introduced. However, a few months have now gone by, so what’s the state of play with the Bill?
UPC Rules of Procedure Consultation Event for Stakeholders: A round-up, and a few views
Last week, ipcopymark and ipcopyemily ventured out of the open plan, into the late summer sunshine, and headed towards Bristows’ offices for the ‘UPC Rules of Procedure Consultation Event for Stakeholders’, jointly hosted by Bristows LLP, the IPO, CIPA and the IP Federation. What unfolded was a thoroughly interesting two hours of discussion, explanation, comment and debate. The level of knowledge of the UPC among the audience was remarkably high, and it was clear that everyone in the auditorium was highly invested in the eventual content of the Rules of Procedure.
The event was chaired by Bobby Mukherjee from the IP Federation; Neil Feinson from the IPO, who is a member of the Preparatory Committee, also spoke, and the discussion panel consisted of Lord Justice Floyd, Kevin Mooney of Simmons and Simmons (both members of the Drafting Committee that has been preparing the draft of the Rules of Procedure), Alan Johnson of Bristows and Richard Vary of Nokia. A recording of the event can be found here.
Seven topics of particular interest were discussed, and below is a brief summary of the issues and commentary on each. But before we turn to these seven topics. IPCopy would like to offer some brief musings of its own on why all of this matters… (more…)
UPC Rules Consultation Event – Political wrangling/mangling
IPcopy was pleased to attend the London based version of the UPC Rules of Procedure Consultation Event for Stakeholders yesterday hosted by Bristows LLP in conjunction with the IPO, CIPA and the IP Federation. We will have a post along shortly (update: this can now be found here) highlighting some of the sections in the rules that are causing a few headaches but in the meantime it is interesting to note some of the comments made by Kevin Mooney who has, of course, been heavily involved in the mammoth task of preparing the various draft rules documents. (more…)
IPcopy 