Unitary Patent Enforcement

Forty years after the first plans for the introduction of the EU patent, 25 Member States (with the exception of Italy, Spain and Croatia) have now adopted the Convention on the introduction of the EU patent with unitary effect. A central component of this is the establishment of a unified patent court (EPC), which has a court of first instance and an appeal court. The court has exclusive jurisdiction for infringement and revocation proceedings. This is intended to eliminate the previous problems of patent law enforcement, such as high costs, the risk of divergent decisions and lack of legal certainty. In this book the authors explain the course of proceedings before the EPC both with regard to the fundamental features of the EU patent, in particular its scope of protection, as well as the procedural enforcement of the EU patent. Since there is still no decision-making practice of the EPC, the authors use the decision-making practice of the national courts.