IP Protection In Europe After Brexit

A summary of the impact of Brexit on patent, design, and trademark rights and their related agreements in both the UK and the EU, by IP lawyers at Michael Best & Friedrich. With regard to patents, they point out the UK’s membership in what’s called the European patent system, under the European Patent Convention, is not affected, but Brexit will take the UK out of the pending European unified patent system under the new Unified Patent Court. That was scheduled to go into effect in 2017, but now is likely to be delayed. The effect of Brexit on existing agreements is difficult to predict, the authors say, but they advise reviewing them for obvious potential issues. Any agreement that refers to the EU or EU law, for example, now would have to amended to include the UK.