01.11.19
Gemini version available ♊︎The Fiction That Spain (or Italy) Can Salvage the UPC
Summary: The proponents/lobbyists of the Unified Patent Court (UPC), firms that make money from patent litigation (we collectively call these “Team UPC”), are nowadays backpedaling, having come to grips with the death of the UPC, realising it’s time to save face by pretending everything they said in the past wasn’t a lie
THE NEW year is well underway, but the European Patent Office (EPO) has said nothing about the UPC. Team UPC has not apologised for misleading the public with fabricated rumours, either. Days ago we noticed that Bristows corrected at least 3 errors in its latest blog post, dated late December. These people know they’re lying, but they try to save face and retain some level of credibility. Bristows uses an arcane CMS that reveals when they make edits, so we compared/assessed the latest edits using Google Cache. It’s quite revealing.
“Bristows uses an arcane CMS that reveals when they make edits, so we compared/assessed the latest edits using Google Cache. It’s quite revealing.”Anyway, no ratification in 2018. Not even close. What will be the next talking point then?
DLA Piper’s Gualtiero Luca Dragotti has just mentioned the UPC in relation to Italy; these people hope that Milan can just magically replace London and suddenly make UPC possible. But the UPC is dead. Team UPC needs to move on. “Unitary Patent” and anything predating it (other names for the same thing) was all along a zombie and nowadays it is a failure, as even its paid media cheerleaders finally admit. They had spent years lying about Spain, spreading what many nowadays call “fake news”. These cheerleaders (IAM) try to save face by belatedly admitting that UPC is dead.
“Guess who else is trying to save face: Kluwer.”“UPC Tracker”, a Twitter account dedicated (for years) to Unified Patent Court propaganda, is also late to admit (or quote): “Saying that the UK can still be a member of the UPC Agreement because it was an EU member at the beginning of the negotiations – even though it is not an EU member anymore – is, in my humble opinion, complete nonsense. Law doesn´t work like that.”
Guess who else is trying to save face: Kluwer. “Deal or no deal,” they’ve repeated the headline in Twitter, the “UK cannot stay in the Unitary Patent system post-Brexit,” based on “Kluwer Patent blogger,” quoting some UPC proponent from Spain; he’s now promoting two lies or fictions: 1) that ‘unitary’ patents are inevitable and 2) that there’s will in Spain to make it happen. From this article/interview (more like a pro-UPC puff piece in dialogue form):
I´m not sure what Spain would do in such a scenario. The translation issue has not been solved yet and it does not look like there will be an acceptable solution for Spain any time soon. Furthermore, litigation is also an issue and might even clash with the Spanish Constitution and what it says about jurisdiction concerning intellectual property rights. The Spanish Constitution could of course be changed, but as said before, given the current political situation in my country, I don´t see the Parliament opening the Pandora´s box of our Constitution because of a patent matter. However, this whole issue is of course a political battle and, as such, it may have very easy solutions that we may not be thinking of right now, such as increasing agriculture aids; new fisheries agreements or Gibraltar. Who knows.’
Fictional nonsense, to put it relatively politely. So their latest strategy might be to pretend that Spain will “save the (their) day…”
“This relates to the issues associated with legal proceedings in a foreign language — one of several Constitution-violating issues raised EU-wide.”The sole comment so far (made it past the blog’s censorship of UPC critics) is from Jan Van Hoey, who rebuts one aspect among many when he says: “Automated translation is discriminatory anyway. There are 2 kinds of people: those who can rely on legally binding laws, and the ones who have to rely on non-legally binding automated translations.”
This relates to the issues associated with legal proceedings in a foreign language — one of several Constitution-violating issues raised EU-wide. Can the defendant be accused, sued and then ‘convicted’ in some court he or she cannot even understand? This redefines the whole concept and theory of the Rule of Law.
The UPC was never meant to be. The fact that it managed to get as far as it has should be seen as extraordinary and it serves to highlight how ripe the political system is to overt corruption (by law firms in this case). █
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