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7 June 2017Patents

UPC’s December deadline pushed back

The introduction of the Unified Patent Court (UPC) has been postponed because some countries have not yet ratified the Agreement.

In January this year, the UPC preparatory committee announced that it was “working under the assumption” that the provisional application phase would start at the end of spring 2017, “presumably in May”, meaning that the court could become operational in December.

However, Germany and the UK have still to ratify the Agreement, which requires 13 signatories including those two countries plus France before the UPC can launch.

Italy became the 12th country to ratify the agreement in February this year, joining Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, Denmark, Finland, France, Italy, Luxembourg, Malta, the Netherlands, Portugal and Sweden in rubber-stamping the Agreement.

In a statement, the UPC preparatory committee said: “The progress of national procedures concerning the ratification of the UPC Agreement and the participation in the protocol on provisional application is being continuously monitored.”

The UK government  gave the green light to ratify the UPC Agreement in November 2016, but the  government has yet to do so because of the general election on June 8.

A new timeline for the recruitment process of the UPC judges will be communicated as soon as possible, the preparatory committee said.

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More on this story

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15 February 2017   Italy has ratified the Unified Patent Court (UPC) Agreement, becoming the 12th signatory to the deal.
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16 June 2017   Germany’s delay of the ratification of the Unified Patent Court Agreement is unlikely to signal the end of the project, although it may have knock-on effects.
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26 June 2017   The UK has taken the next step in its Unified Patent Court plan by laying out secondary legislation in Parliament today.