08.31.17
Gemini version available ♊︎Bristows Turns British Government Report Which Says Nothing About the UPC Into a Self-Serving Plug and a Lie
Summary: A week-old article from Bloomberg twisted British government reporting as UPC promotion, due to interjections of deluded marketing by Bristows LLP (notorious for manipulations, lies and nefarious meddling)
THERE will be no UPC in the UK. Given the current trajectory, with insistence on Brexit, ratification and more so implementation is untenable. But don’t ask Team UPC about it. They either live in a parallel universe or are intentionally lying (to the public and to clients).
“You appear to have missed this great piece,” a source told us about Bloomberg coverage that Bristows boasted about in “news and publications”. It mirrors something which we mentioned a week ago. We wrote about Managing IP producing this kind of spin in a tweet, but we did not see Bristows doing the same. As the first paragraph makes clear, it’s not at all about the UPC:
The U.K. government Aug. 23 released a position paper on its future relationship with the EU after its “Brexit” from the bloc. The government did not discuss the UPC, but emphasized it is common for parties to international treaties to agree to submit disputes to bodies such as the Court of Justice of the European Union, the highest court in the EU.
But watch how Bristows then interjects the UPC into it:
However, the U.K. Intellectual Property Office has characterized the UPC as an “international patent court” since it announced in November 2016 that the U.K. will [sic] ratify the UPC agreement. The CJEU’s role in the UPC system is also rather limited, Edward Nodder, senior partner of patent litigation at Bristows LLP in London, told Bloomberg BNA.
“It’s important to remember that the appeals court is not the CJEU—the UPC will have its own very experienced appeals court,” he said. Appeals from the UPC will [sic] be heard by the UPC’s Court of Appeal under the UPC agreement.
Limited Role
The CJEU’s role is only to interpret EU law relevant to the UPC when it needs to be clarified, Alan Johnson, partner in patent litigation at Bristows in London, told Bloomberg BNA. The court will [sic] be asked to review issues such as supplementary protection certificates, which act as patent term extensions to compensate for protection lost to regulatory approval processes, the Biotech Directive, and perhaps some initial jurisdictional questions, Johnson said. “Those are fairly restrictive, and not desperately important topics in many ways,” he said.
Notice how many times they say “will” as if they’re this certain it will happen. The report was not even about the UPC. At all!
Other than that, almost not a word this week about the EPO or the UPC. Earlier today there was this press release about a European Patent on cancer treatment — a controversial subject we covered here before as it raises ethical questions. █
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