Public Talk: UPC Opt-Out Or Not?
Great honor for me to be invited to talk in front of an audience from Texas/USA.
In this talk, I go into deeper detail about the very few cases when an “Opt-Out” of a European Patent from the jurisdiction of the Unified Patent Court (UPC) is recommended (from minute 40:00 onwards in the video below) and it is better to be under the jurisdiction of a national court. One of them is that you are supplying a product to several different governments and you can successfully keep competitors out because there is a patent for this product.
And don’t create Unitary Patents (UPs) from European Patent Applications that can obtain Supplementary Protection Certificate (SPC): there is (still) no SPC for UPs, but only for national patents. I have never encountered such a case during my 30 years in the patent area but I know that there are some out there.
After minute 28:30, I talk about non-US material law as far it is relevant for the scope of protection, and after minute 35:00, I talk about converting a US drafting style patent into a non-US style patent. In very short words: A litigation-grade UP/UPC EP patent is somewhat like the opposite of a litigation-grade US patent. I speak from experience.
And here is my recorded talk:

The slides for my talk are on SlideShare (click here) or you can download them here: UPC Land presentation Craige Thompson 010323