BREXIT | 2306®

With an uncanny sense of comedic timing, the film “Stan & Ollie” is being released this month in the UK.  The famous duo’s catchphrase seems apt to describe the current state of the UK’s Brexit process.  We still do not know how or when, or even if, the UK will leave the EU.  However, if nothing changes, the UK will leave the EU on 29^th March 2019. 

The UK will officially leave the EU on March 29^th 2019.  There is provisionally a transitional period until December 31^st 2020, and we think the most likely outcome is that this will be extended, so that there is still plenty of time to sort out what to do about IP that is affected by Brexit.  However, with everyone falling out, a “nein deal” is now a genuine possibility, and the UK has recently issued no deal guidelines for intellectual property. 

No sooner has the EU Commission and the United Kingdom announced that they have agreed on a significant part of a draft Withdrawal Agreement, (which makes mention of intellectual property in Articles 50-57), than the Commission has issued a “Notice to Stakeholders” about .eu domain names. 

This is our first Brexit Bulletin since December.  We know a lot of you are getting Brexit newsletters from firms like ours, all saying the same thing, (and mainly saying nothing….).  We have always tried to make our Brexit Bulletin worth reading. So, while we approached the halfway mark in the Brexit negotiations, and there was frankly little say, we decided to take a little rest...

We have discovered that a number of our patent attorney friends around the world are under a misapprehension about what Brexit means for patents.  This is how their conversations with us typically go.

The European Commission has just released a position paper on Brexit and intellectual property, which we have commented on at length for Intellectual Property Magazine (here).  Here's our summary of the main features and what we think. 

Co-existence agreements are a popular way of settling EU trade mark disputes, and many EU trade mark owners are signatories to at least one such agreement.  However, can such co-existence agreements and other legal contracts, like consents and licences (and including those for designs as well as trade marks), be relied upon in the future? To create legal certainty, we think every EU agreement needs to be rewritten, or at least be amended by the execution of an addendum and here's why...