Recently, fundamental doubts have increased considerably as to whether the timetable for the entry into force of the Agreement on a Unified Patent Court (UPCA) presented on 6 October 2022 (we reported on this blog) could be kept. This is because even at a time so close to the planned start of the Sunrise Period, there are still considerable technical problems.
Now apparently the emergency brake has been pulled: The President of the Court of Appeal and the Acting Chairman of the Administrative Committee of the Unified Patent Court (UPC) announced today that the entire so-called “roadmap” will be postponed by 2 months!
What does this mean?
- The Sunrise Period, a three-month transition period, is now scheduled to begin on 1 March 2023.
- Accordingly, the UPCA is scheduled to enter into force on 1 June 2023, and the EPC is expected to become operational the same day.
The main reasons for this postponement are the multiple problems that the future users of the new system are facing even now, less than four weeks before the originally planned start of the Sunrise Period. The future court is to be IT-based and generally only accessible via the Case Management System (CMS). That means that all motions, especially the opt-out requests already possible during the Sunrise Period, must be filed through CMS. Provided that this system is accessible…
To date, there are hardly any providers (including none in Germany!) who can provide an authentication certificate accepted by the UPC, which is mandatory for the user authentication (login). According to rumors among the German users, there is a single provider (from Luxembourg) who, however, will probably soon be overburdened by inquiries.
In view of these CMS access problems, the upcoming holidays and a possible de facto shortening of the three-month Sunrise Period due to technical problems alone, the postponement now announced is a gift. Because this unified patent jurisdiction, which has been hard-won over so many decades, cannot and must not afford a faulty start!
Worth reading: Article by Thorsten Bausch in KluwerPatentBlog from 28.11.2022 (en)
