Reference/credit: Estelle Derclaye's homepage
THE Mafia-like EPO has been largely responsible for attacks on truth itself. It corrupted the media, corrupted politicians, corrupted delegates and continues to corrupt everything it touches. That's why an independent (or untainted by money) assessment is sorely needed.
This paper discusses the consequences on the main intellectual property rights (patent, copyright, trade marks and designs) as well as on trade secrets of a hard Brexit, namely an exit of the United Kingdom from the European Union which means that it will not longer be bound by EU law.
The implications of Brexit in the field of patents are less dramatic since there is very little substantive EU patent law. The core of the patent system operating in EU Member States is a creature of an international convention, the 1973 European Patent Convention (EPC), as revised in 2000, rather than of EU law. The EPC has ten adhering states which are not EU Member States (as well as two extension states and two validation states). Leaving the EU does not require the UK to leave the EPC, and there has been no suggestion that it should do so.
However, Brexit does raise significant problems with respect to an ambitious procedural innovation that is intended to simplify and reduce the costs of patent enforcement. For decades, the EU has been trying to establish a unitary EU patent that would allow enforcement throughout the EU. The unitary patent, if it eventually comes into effect, will allow the right holder to enforce a single patent throughout participating EU states through a single patent court established by an international agreement (rather than EU legislation). But that court is conceptually a court of all Member States with an obligation to refer the supposedly few questions of EU law that will arise, because that conceptualisation is necessary to comply with a judgment of the Court of Justice. If the UK Government adheres to its political position that the UK will not in any way be subject to EU law and the Court of Justice, then Brexit will likely exclude the UK from that scheme because of the possible reference to EU law. More significantly, the agreement establishing the system required 13 Member States and France, Germany and the UK to ratify it for the system to start functioning and one of the central divisions was going to be based in London. So the UK’s withdrawal from the EU could mean that the entire system will not go into effect even for the remaining Member States (at the moment, Spain and Poland are not participating in the Unitary Patent Court). Surprisingly though, at the end of November 2016, the UK confirmed it will ratify the unified patent court agreement. So at least, for now, the new system is apparently saved (though to what real effect is not entirely clear).