European Unitary Patent and Patent Box dominate the London patent summit

With a key meeting on the 40-year old saga of the European Single Unitary Patent scheduled for December 22, it was always likely that discussion of the Single Patent would dominate the London Patent Summit, held this month at the London Stock Exchange.

Both the global investment community and corporates interested in selling innovative products into the European market have a keen interest in seeing if this time round the Single European Patent will actually be allowed to become a reality. If it comes about, the new regime will make it cheaper and faster to enforce a patent EU-wide.

In her paper on the implications of the Unitary Patent, Lucy Johnson, a director of global intellectual property firm Murgitroyd, told delegates to the London Patent Summit that, while a number of very significant hurdles had finally been overcome, including the thorny issues of which European languages would be used, where and how patents would be filed and where disputes would be resolved, there was still no absolute certainty of success. "As the old adage has it, there is many a slip twixt cup and lip and there have been several occasions in the past when it looked as if we were about to get a single European patent regime, only to see the process put back into the melting pot," she says. The benefits to clients of the introduction of a unified European patent regime would be huge, with potential savings of £2.1 billion ($3.4 billion) for the UK economy alone.