Wednesday, May 07, 2014 EPO board issues a statement on the Unitary Patent and Unified Patent Court.

The Economic and Scientific Advisory Board (ESAB) of the EPO has issued a statement on the Unitary Patent and Unified Patent Court.

The statement is generally positive, and points out a number of advantages of the new system. According to the Board:

Benefits of the unitary patent include:

• Administrative simplification of patenting in Europe, 
• Potential for saving costs, including validation, translation, and post-grant administration costs, 
• Geographic extension of patent protection. 

 
 Benefits of the unified patent court include:

• Reduction in the high cost of enforcement for firms that validate in many or all member states
• Developing harmonized and consistent jurisprudence throughout the territory of the member states

Concerns include

• Unitary patent renewal fees and the costs related to litigation before the Unified Patent Court
• Increased complexity due to the additional tier added to the patent system
• Non-Practising Entities may become more active in Europe

The findings of the Board are based on a workshop they organized in December 2013, and a study they commissioned to Europe Economics.

Thursday, December 19, 2013 Select Committee discusses compensation scheme for translation costs

At the Epo website there is a short report of the last meeting of the Select Committee on 10 and 11 December 2013.  At the EPO the select committee sets the rules of procedure for handling the unitary patent.

One of the discussed items is the compensation scheme for costs for translations. This scheme is introduced by article 5 of regulation 1260/2012. I can imagine that some if its provisions will cause the EPO some work to implement right.

Wednesday, December 11, 2013 Level of Renewal fees not expected soon

One of the open question regarding the unitary patent is the level of the fees. Of immediate concern is the level of the renewal fee. After a unitary patent has been granted, one does not pay individual renewals for all participating states, but instead one central renewal fee, to be paid to EPO.

The level of the renewal fee will determine where the break-even point will be, cost-wise, between classic validation and a unitary patent.

Thursday, June 13, 2013 More translations needed for a unitary patent?

In my last post I noted that the unitary patent requires fewer translations than regular European validations. During the transitory period, this may not be true.

Consider the following example. You have a granted European patent application with an English text.  The patent has 20 pages of specification and 2 more pages of claims. You only need patent protection in France, German, and the United Kingdom.  You are still in the transitory period.

Without a unitary patent, you do not require any further translation than already imposed by the EPO. This is a result of the London Agreement. This means that when your application gets to grant you need to translate the claims into two official languages. In total you need 2+2=4 pages of translation.

If you decide to obtain protection in these three countries through a unitary patent you need to provide a full translation of the patent as well.  You still need to translate 4 pages for the claims, but in addition 22 pages for a full translation in another EU language are needed. In total you need 22+2+2=26 of translation.

Going through the unitary patent route instead of the conventional route gives a more than 6 fold increase in translation requirements.


Even if you extend the number of countries in which you wish protection with say, Denmark, the Netherlands, and Sweden, the regular system still requires fewer translations. To validate in these countries, I need only translate the claims, so the score becomes, 26 pages for unitary versus 10 pages for conventional European patent.

To be fair, there are many European countries that would require a full translation in this example under the old system but will not for in the unitary system, say Portugal, Belgium, or Austria. So adding these countries to the list would swing the advantage to the unitary patent.

Validation only in the United Kingdom, Germany, France and the Netherlands are not uncommon. For such a limited list of countries the short term validation costs increase significantly. This may impact the decision to go for unitary effect or not. 

Note, that this doesn't take into account other cost factors, in particular renewal fees. Moreover, the additional translation imposed by the transitory period has no legal effect, so some may be tempted to skimp on its quality.