Report on possible amendments to UK law to accommodate new Unified Patent Court: little to report

It's a rather technical document, but it's quite short and it's definitely about patent litigation: published by the United Kingdom's Intellectual Property Office, it's called Technical Review and Call for Evidence: Summary of Responses. In short,

The Intellectual Property Office consulted on proposed changes to the Patents Act 1977 to introduce the Unified Patent Court (UPC) and the Unitary Patent between 10 June 2014 and 2 September 2014.

The Government received twenty responses to the Technical Review and Call for Evidence. These came from businesses which may own patents or use patented inventions, legal firms and patent attorney practices, and also some organisations representing particular business/technology sectors. Responses went into varying levels of detail, with some looking at the fine detail of the proposed legislation, and also those which looked at high level principles. Different sectors had different concerns and priorities.

You can read the document here.  If you don't want to read it, or haven't the time, don't worry: there will not be any legislative proposals springing out of it before the UK government has published its own formal Response document -- for which there is as yet no projected publication date.

What's interesting is the very small number of interested parties making responses, listed on page 7. Whether this is a result of poor publicity for the consultation process, apathy or people simply being too busy, it's a disappointing and does send out something of a message that most people aren't particularly concerned.