Unitary Patent and national law, by Dr. Tilman Müller-Stoy and Florian Paschold, Bardehle Pagenberg
With regard to unitary patents, national law often has to be applied to fill in the gaps the unitary patent regulation has left. If we take the EPO’s application figures since 2010 as a basis for the unitary patent, it can be predicted that German law will (partly) have to be applied to over 80% of all unitary patents in the future. Although the unitary patent will be an extremely important industrial property right in economic terms, there is much about it that is still unclear. Nevertheless, the exploitation of future unitary patents should be considered even now, as the substantive law governing the unitary patent as an object of property will already be determined with a present patent application.
Read the entire contribution here.