Consultation on Court Fees: What were the public responses ?

In May 2015, the IPO and CIFA organised a consultation on Court Fees. See our post here.  In July, the UPC Blog participated to the webinar organised by both organisations and summarised for you the  Background of the consultation, The Issues at stake in the consultation document and the Discussion that followed between the participants. These can be found here.

Finally, in its October Newsletter (See below), the EPLAW reveals that 146 responses were received, 68 from the Italian Chambers of Commerce, and identified the main issues raised by the participants:

  • greater clarity is required where multiple parties / patents are involved
  • the guidelines for the calculation of value-based fees should be published for comment
  • no value-based fee should be payable for a counterclaim for revocation the opt-out fees should be lower than 80 Euros
  • there is divided opinion on the desirability of alternative one as compared to alternative two to aid SMEs
  • the caps on recoverable costs are too high at the lower values of cases.
  • there should be a value-based fee for an application for a preliminary injunction

These responses were presented to the Preparatory Committee on 19th October who will present a final draft of Court Fees in February 2016 after negotiating with Member States.

A consultation on the UPC court fees in Spring?

While the EPO is working on a fee structure for the renewal of the Unitary Patent (see our post), the UPC Preparatory Committee discussed at its 8th meeting on 27 February 2015 the court fee structure and consultation document.

According to its website, the UPC now anticipates that this consultation will launch in Spring 2015. The Chairman of the Preparatory Committee is in fact “keen to begin engaging with stakeholder and users and asked the relevant working group co-ordinators to prepare the text to meet this deadline”. The IPCopy reports that “the Fees Consultation Sub-group is working towards a redraft of the court fees consultation document to be released in May. There are apparently a number of inconclusive “key policy points” but there is recognition that they need to seek views as soon as possible.” To this effect, the comments of the Expert Panel -who advises the Chair and working group co-ordinators and met in February 2015- are now being considered by the relevant teams. Thus, if the Select Committee meets its deadline we should thus soon know more about the UPC fees…