Friday 21 February 2014

Denmark and the UPC: breaking news

If Denmark's national aquarium looks like this, can
anyone imagine what its UPC building might look like?
From our friend George Brock-Nannestad comes news, fresh from Danish Radio station P1, that the current two-party Government in Denmark has entered into a political agreement with the parties outside the government Venstre, De Konservative, Liberal Alliance and SF (who broke away from the Government a couple of weeks ago) that a local department of the Unified Patent Court UPC) should be created in Copenhagen. There had previously been a proposal to create a Nordic local department. George adds:
Before getting further details about the agreement I consider this an attempt to make sure that the proposal for Danish ratification does not fall at the referendum that is to be made on the same date as the elections for the European Parliament on 25 May. The public debate has been very tiny, and it has been driven by the parties Dansk Folkeparti and Enhedslisten, who believe that how the UPC will actually function in practice is too uncertain to accept from the outset. 
An attempt to support ratification by the Government was tried a couple of weeks ago in newspaper debate, but it was completely overshadowed by the disruption of the Government. My own view is that there has been far too little information on the flood of patents that will submerge Danish SMEs: 10 times as many per year as the Danish validations of European patents as we know it.

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