The Patent Mediation and Arbitration Centre (PMAC) forms part of the Unified Patent Court (UPC). Its rules of operation are have now been published. It operates independently, but carries out its tasks in close contact and cooperation with the committees/bodies of the UPC which will have to take decisions in relation to the operation of the Centre. The Centre has its seats in Ljubljana, Slovenia, and Lisbon, Portugal. Mediation and arbitration proceedings can be held either at the seats or elsewhere. Read more

The UPC Administrative Committee has issued confirmation of the location of the various local and regional divisions of the Unified Patent Court (UPC).  Whilst all other participating states will have one local court (or participate in the Nordic-Baltic regional division announced), Germany will have three local division courts - Dusseldorf, Hamburg and Mannheim. At the same time the numbers of national judges on each panel have also been confirmed for each court. Read more

Creating an NFT can give rise to other IP issues, aside from questions of transfer of rights. In particular there is the issue of who in fact has the right to create and release NFTs and whether the NFT infringes third party rights. In this third of our series of NFT IP blog posts, we deal with "minting", ie the creation and sale of NFTs. Read more

Jérôme Debrulle, Chair of the Select Committee of the Administrative Council for the Unitary Patent, has recently said that his committee’s work in preparation for the coming of the UPC is now complete.  He commented in an EPO press release that “In October 2021 the Select Committee adopted an ambitious work programme to complete the … Read more

The China State Administration for Market Regulation has published a Regulation on Prohibition for Abuse of Intellectual Property Rights to Exclude or Restrict Competition (Draft for Comment), which is now open to the public for comments.  The Regulation reflects the latest approach of the China authorities to the relationship between competition law and intellectual property enforcement, which has been a topic of concern for a long time, and includes clarification on scenarios that will be deemed abuses of market dominance in relation to SEP licensing. Read more

The CJEU has recently issued a preliminary ruling dealing with the requirements needed for a patent preliminary injunction (PI) under Art. 9(1) IP Enforcement Directive 2004/48/EC, holding that the provision precludes "national case-law under which applications for interim relief for patent infringement must, in principle, be dismissed where the validity of the patent in question has not been confirmed, at the very least, by a decision given at first instance in opposition or invalidity proceedings". The CJEU decision will be seen as an encouragement for courts to grant preliminary injunctions under "untested" (eg. recently granted) patents, which has an impact beyond the German national system from where the reference originated, on other European courts and even the UPC. Read more

HSF technology disputes practitioners Andrew Moir, Rachel Lidgate, Martin Hevey, Kate Macmillan, Peter Dalton, Heather Newton and Rachel Montagnon have recently published a Q&A in Practical Law on Disputes in the Technology Industry covering all aspects of disputes in the sector including current and future trends. Read more