The European Commission announced last Friday that more than 27,000 unitary patents have been registered during the first year of the Unitary Patent System (UPS).
This is about a quarter of all patent applications during the first year of the new system. The streamlining UPS was introduced on 1 June 2023 and offers a single patent, with no need to validate the patent in each country, a single renewal fee, under a single legal system and before a single Unified Patent Court, for the participating countries.
Patent applications, which are filed to help protect and market inventions, are an early indicator of companies’ R&D investments. The system is managed by the European Patent Office (EPO), with headquarters in Munich.
The EPO is the executive arm of the European Patent Organisation, an international organisation with 39 member states, and one of the largest public service organisations in Europe. To handle the workload, the EPO employs some 6,300 staff, of whom nearly 4 000 are scientists and engineers working as patent examiners in all fields of technology.
This participation rate in UPS is steadily increasing, according to the Commission. The uptake rate reaches almost 50% among applicants established in Denmark and Poland, and about 40% in Spain. Most patents are awarded for medical technology (31%), civil engineering (6%) and transport (5%). While the uptake rate is expected to continue to increase it seems to have stagnated in the last two months.
As previously reported, Luis Berenguer, Principal Director of Communication at the EPO, told The Brussels Times that the uptake rate had increased from 17.5 % last year to 24 % by end March this year. Of the innovators who have transformed their European patents into Unitary Patents, some two-thirds are European.
The participation in the UPS is voluntary and is open to all EU member states. Currently 17 member states participate in the UPS, representing about three quarters of the EU's GDP. Soon, Romania will become the 18th participating member. The Commission did not explain why some member states are reluctant to join the new system.
The Commission aims to strengthen the system further with the creation of a unitary supplementary protection certificate (SPC), which will allow for the extension of unitary patent rights for specific authorised pharmaceutical and plant protection products in a unitary manner.
M. Apelblat
The Brussels Times
