The European patent system is in the spotlight again. The Portuguese Government has recently tried to break the deadlock on the creation of a unified European patent litigation system and the European Patent Convention will soon experience its first major changes since it was created in the 1970s.
The Portuguese Government, currently holding the European Union presidency, has published a ‘non-paper’ which sets out features of a proposed unified European patent litigation system. This would replace the current national actions, which often led to different decisions in different countries and parties playing the system in the hope of obtaining a more favourable result. Under the proposed scheme, a central division would hear validity issues while infringement cases would be heard at member state level by a first instance division. The thinking behind this is to avoid diverging judgments on validity and to guarantee maximum expertise and technical knowledge on validity issues.
