Home » Posts tagged 'unitary patent news'
Tag Archives: unitary patent news
Unitary Patent Package – The Ratification Game (Lithuania completes its ratification formalities)
Update (25 August 2017)
According to the website of the Council of the European Union, Lithuania has now deposited its instrument of ratification (on 24 August 2017) to become the 14th country to complete its ratification formalities. Lithuania joins Estonia, Italy, the Netherlands, Bulgaria, Finland, Portugal, Luxembourg, Malta, Denmark, Belgium, Sweden, France and Austria as one of the fourteen countries who have completed their ratification processes.
The unitary patent system requires 13 countries to ratify, including the UK, France and Germany. The EU Referendum in the UK threw the timescale into doubt last year and the Preparatory Committee recently noted that there are some additional hurdles to be overcome before the system can go live, namely securing enough approvals to the Protocol on Provisional Application (PPA) and the resolution to the challenge in the German Constitutional Court. Despite these issues the Preparatory Committee still seem to be working toward the sunrise period at the UPC starting in early 2018.
There are now enough countries to have ratified the unified patent court agreement that the system will come into effect if the UK and Germany complete their own ratification procedures and sufficient approvals to the PPA are obtained.
Now that Lithuania has completed all of the formalities we have updated our ratification infographic (for an answer to the question “What’s up with this infographic?“, please see the bottom of the post!”).
(more…)
Unitary Patent Package – The Ratification Game (Estonia completes its ratification formalities)
Update (2 August 2017)
According to the website of the Council of the European Union, Estonia has now deposited its instrument of ratification (on 1 August 2017) to become the 13th country to complete its ratification formalities. Estonia joins Italy, the Netherlands, Bulgaria, Finland, Portugal, Luxembourg, Malta, Denmark, Belgium, Sweden, France and Austria as one of the thirteen countries who have completed their ratification processes.
The unitary patent system requires 13 countries to ratify, including the UK, France and Germany. The EU Referendum in the UK threw the timescale into doubt last year and the Preparatory Committee recently noted that there are some additional hurdles to be overcome before the system can go live, namely securing enough approvals to the Protocol on Provisional Application (PPA) and the resolution to the challenge in the German Constitutional Court. Despite these issues the Preparatory Committee still seem to be working toward the sunrise period at the UPC starting in early 2018.
There are now enough countries to have ratified the unified patent court agreement that the system will come into effect if the UK and Germany complete their own ratification procedures and sufficient approvals to the PPA are obtained.
Now that Estonia has completed all of the formalities we have updated our ratification infographic (for an answer to the question “What’s up with this infographic?“, please see the bottom of the post!”).
(more…)
Unitary Patent Package – The Ratification Game (Italy completes its ratification formalities)
Update (13 February 2017)
According to the website of the Council of the European Union, Italy has now deposited its instrument of ratification (on 10 February 2017) to become the 12th country to complete its ratification formalities. Italy joins the Netherlands, Bulgaria, Finland, Portugal, Luxembourg, Malta, Denmark, Belgium, Sweden, France and Austria as one of the twelve countries who have completed their ratification processes.
The unitary patent system requires 13 countries to ratify, including the UK, France and Germany. Although the EU Referendum in the UK threw the timescale into doubt, the Preparatory Committee recently confirmed that the target date for the unitary patent system to go live is December 2017.
There are now enough countries to have ratified the unified patent court agreement that the system will come into effect if just the UK and Germany complete their own ratification procedures.
Now that Italy has completed all of the formalities we have updated our ratification infographic (for an answer to the question “What’s up with this infographic?“, please see the bottom of the post!”).
(more…)
Unitary Patent Package – The Ratification Game (Luxembourg completes its ratification formalities)
Update (22 May 2015)
According to the website of the Council of the European Union, Luxembourg has now deposited its instrument of ratification (on 22 May 2015) to become the seventh country to complete its ratification formalities. Luxembourg joins Malta, Denmark, Belgium, Sweden, France and Austria as one of the seven countries who have completed their ratification processes.
Regular readers will recall that we noted back in March that Luxembourg had ratified the UPC Agreement but had not deposited its instrument of ratification in Brussels. Now that Luxembourg has completed all of the formalities we have updated our ratification infographic (for an answer to the question “What’s up with this infographic?“, please see the bottom of the post!”).
UPC Court Delivers Swift Justice
On 2nd April 2015 we saw, for the first time, an approximation of the Unified Patent Court (UPC) in action during an excellent live-from-Paris webinarized event set up by a plethora of French IP institutions. Indeed, the sheer number of acronymical institutions (thirteen!) representing the interests of the French IP industry was almost as impressive as the high quality of the broadcast itself. (more…)
Unitary Patent Package – The Ratification Game (Malta Ratifies the UPC Agreement)
Update (10 December 2014)
According to the website of the Council of the European Union, Malta deposited its instrument of ratification on 9 December 2014 to become the sixth country to complete its ratification formalities. Malta joins Denmark, Belgium, Sweden, France and Austria as one of the six countries who have completed their ratification processes.
Now that Malta has joined the “ratification” group it means that the “Malta Problem”, which is discussed in depth here, will kick in once the unitary patent system is up and running. In a nutshell, no European patent application filed before 1 March 2007, and which is still pending, will be eligible to become a unitary patent (assuming it grants after the unitary patent system goes live).
Recent unitary patent themed seminars have given the impression that additional UPC ratifications in 2014 were unexpected so this news is something of a surprise. However, we had heard suggestions back in January this year that Malta might have ratified. If the news story we picked up on earlier in the year was correct then presumably Malta delayed depositing its instrument of ratification for nearly a year for some reason.
IPcopy’s ratification infographic has been updated to reflect the news from Malta (for an answer to the question “What’s up with this infographic?“, please see the bottom of the post!”).
Unitary Patent Package – The Ratification Game
We previously reported that both France and Malta had ratified the unified patent court agreement. Despite this we had held off updating the “Ratification” Game post until the European Commission website showed that further instruments of ratification had actually been deposited in Brussels.
So, who would grab second place after Austria? Malta or France or maybe an outsider?
Well, we can now reveal that (more…)
Unitary Patent Package – The Ratification Game [Updated: 12 August 2013]
[Update (12.8.13) – Austria has apparently deposited its instrument of ratification. The Info graphic and State of Play text below have been updated.]
As discussed in our Q&A post on the unitary patent package, the unified patent court agreement requires 13 or more participating member states to ratify the agreement before the unitary patent system can get up and running. Furthermore, three of those 13 member states need to be France, Germany and the United Kingdom.
We will be following the ratification process here on IPcopy but thought we’d try and do so via the medium of football and info graphics.
So, without further ado here’s the process of ratification re-imagined in the form of a (wildly stretched) football analogy. The European team “UPP United” (Unitary Patent Package) are at the ground for their match against the Rest of the World (an aim of the unitary patent system is to make the European patent system more competitive compared to the systems in the US and Japan). This being a slightly inaccurate analogy the European team will comprise 13 players (instead of the usual 11) and will form up in a 5-5-2 formation! The info graphic is below and more notes are further down the post. We hope you enjoy.
Unitary Patent Package – Rules of Procedure for the Unified Patent Court (14th Draft)
As noted in our tweet last week the 14th draft of the Rules of Procedure of the Unified Patent Court have appeared online (a copy can be found here). The document runs to almost 150 pages and 382 rules so it’s something of an early Christmas present for insomniacs.
The release of the 14th draft is expected to shortly be followed by the public consultation exercise on the rules of procedure. IPcopy understands that the window for public comments could be as short as one month and we will let you know as soon as we hear more. It is noted that page 2 of the 14th draft states that it is the aim of the Drafting Committee to complete the draft rules within three months of the signature of the Agreement (which is expected to happen on 19th February).
Unitary Patent Package – The Ratification Game (The UK completes its ratification formalities)
Update (26 April 2018)
According to the website of the Council of the European Union (and just about every other official IP channel), the UK deposited its instrument of ratification (on 26 April 2018) to become the 16th country to complete its ratification formalities. The UK joins Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, Italy, the Netherlands, Bulgaria, Finland, Portugal, Luxembourg, Malta, Denmark, Belgium, Sweden, France and Austria as one of the sixteen countries who have completed their ratification processes.
The unitary patent system requires 13 countries to ratify, including the UK, France and Germany. However, the German Constitutional Court challenge has thrown the timescale and the long term future of the unitary patent system into doubt.
There are now enough countries to have ratified the unified patent court agreement that the system will come into effect if Germany completes its own ratification procedures and sufficient approvals to the PPA are obtained.
Now that the UK has completed all of the formalities we have updated our ratification infographic (for an answer to the question “What’s up with this infographic?“, please see the bottom of the post!”).
IPcopy 