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A closer look at the UPC central division
Februar 2016
It has been reported that Germany has taken the first steps required to ratify the Agreement on the Unified Patent Court.
Ratification by Germany, France, and the UK is required before the unitary patent becomes into effect. The UK has already taken steps to be able to ratify the agreement, and France ratified already in 2014.
With the launch of the Unified Patent Court (UPC) in 2017 looking ever more likely, we have taken a closer look at how the allocation of cases among the three seats of the central division of the UPC might look in practice. As there are no cases live within the UPC, we have used European patent application and opposition statistics as a proxy of how cases might be distributed.
The article was first published in February 2016, CIPA Journal –UPC Special Edition.