On 11 April 2024, Romania published its ratification of the UPC Agreement. The ratification now needs to be deposited with the EU. Then on the first day of the fourth month following deposit Romania will become the 18th full contracting member state of the Unified Patent Court (UPC).
Once Romania is a contracting member state European Patents registered for unitary effect (Unitary Patents) will have full effect in that country. The UPC has exclusive jurisdiction over Unitary Patents and will also have exclusive jurisdiction over all European Patents in Romania unless they have previously been opted out of the UPC.
Currently, six other EU member states are signatories of the UPC Agreement but have not yet completed ratification. These are Czech Republic, Ireland, Greece, Cyprus, Hungary and Slovakia. Ireland recently announced a delay in holding a referendum on ratification that had been expected to take place in June 2024.
UPDATE 4 June 2024: The UPC has now confirmed that Romania’s ratification has been deposited and that Romania will become the 18th full contracting member state of the UPC on 1st September 2024.
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Food and beverage
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Artificial intelligence and machine learning
Consumer goods and retail
Anti-counterfeit devices
Moda
Health, fitness and sport
Beauty
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Printing tech
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Electronics and electrical devices
Restaurants and bars
Travel and leisure
Testing systems, control systems, signal processing
Computer and IT architecture and system design
Medical devices
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Scientific instruments
Semiconductor devices
Wearable tech and human interfaces
Communications and networks
Oceanography, marine
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Space and satellites
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Generic market entry
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Methods of production and synthesis
Personalised medicine/disease biomarkers
Pharmaceutical formulations
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Supplementary protection certificates (SPCs)
Biotechnology
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Next generation sequencing
Women’s health products
Vaccinology (e.g. viral vectors; mRNA vaccines)
Therapeutic antibodies
Synthetic biology
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Recombinant protein production and purification
Personalised medicine/disease biomarkers
Nucleic acid synthesis
Supplementary protection certificates (SPCs)
Immuno-oncology (e.g. checkpoint inhibitors; modified T cells)
GM crops
Genomic and molecular tools and methods
Gene editing (e.g. CRISPR)
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Data and software security, cryptography and digital rights management (DRM)
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