Recent developments in the Unitary Patent
In the previous installment, we provided a refresher to both the Unitary Patent and Unified Patent Court. Now we examine the statistics to surmise how the systems have been received.
Since its entry into force, statistics on some aspects of the filed requests for Unitary Patent (UP) provide an insight into how the system has been received by proprietors.
According to the statistics published by the EPO, the current cumulative rate of granted patents that are pursued as unitary patents is 19.4%, with the percentage being expected to rise in the coming years.
In terms of the geographical distribution of the proprietors, the UP is, perhaps not surprisingly, pretty much a European affair, with 64.2% of proprietors being located in EPO states, notably Germany, France, Switzerland, Italy and Great Britain. From outside of Europe, most proprietors are located in the US, followed by China, Korea and Japan.
The largest technology field concentrating most of the requests for UP is medical technology with about 13% of the UP requests falling under this field, followed by, e.g., measurement, civil engineering, digital communication, electrical machinery and transport with each about 5%.
As for the languages in which the required translation is filed, Spanish is the most common translation language, which likely indicates that most proprietors validate their patents in Spain, an undoubtably valuable market in Europe for proprietors, and not a part of the new system. Not surprisingly, the second largest translation language is English, followed by German, Italian, French and Dutch.
The first year of the UPC in numbers
The UPC has also yielded some statistics. In the first year, 134 actions have been brought, of which 71 are infringement actions, and 63 are counterclaims for revocation. Additionally, 39 free-standing revocation actions have been brought up, that is, revocation actions not raised as a counterclaim to an infringement action, and 27 actions have been brought for provisional measures, such as the preliminary actions.
It may be of interest to note that the UPC has its Court of Appeal in Luxembourg, and that its Central Division is currently divided between Paris and Munich, with a third section planned to be located in Milan after London became no longer eligible after Brexit.
A regional division of the Court of First Instance is located in Stockholm, Riga, Tallinn, and Vilnius.
Local divisions of the Court of First Instance are located in Brussels, Copenhagen, Helsinki, Lisbon, Ljubljana, Munich, Düsseldorf, Mannheim, Hamburg, Paris, Milan, The Hague and Vienna.
The Mediation and Arbitration Centre is are located in Lisbon and Ljubljana. The Training Centre is located in Budapest.
Local divisions in countries with a large number of patent matters will have court panels with 2 judges from the hosting country and 1 judge from a pool of judges from the rest of Europe, whereas local divisions in countries with a lower number of patent matters will have court panels with 1 local judge and 2 external judges coming from the rest of Europe.
In the next edition we will look at both systems to identify their Pros and Cons.
The content of this article is intended to provide a general guide to the subject matter. Specialist advice should be sought about your specific circumstances.