Skip to content

UPC Unified Patent Court (UPC) — regional
Layer regional
Jurisdiction n/a (supranational court; 18 EU contracting member states as of 2026-05 — AT, BE, BG, DK, EE, FI, FR, DE, IT, LV, LT, LU, MT, NL, PT, RO, SI, SE)
Issuing body Unified Patent Court (Court of First Instance: Munich / Paris / Milan Central Divisions, 13 Local Divisions + Nordic-Baltic Regional Division; Court of Appeal: Luxembourg)
Rights administered patent (judicial — first-instance and appellate jurisdiction over Unitary Patents and, subject to opt-out, traditional European Patents)
Working languages English, French, German (Central Division + Court of Appeal); local procedural languages at the Local Divisions (DE, IT, NL, FR, SE/EN, etc.)
Connector status active (both decisions feed and statutes corpus shipped in v0.11.0; CMS Public Read API blocked on enrollment — see §6)
Last verified 2026-05-18

Manifest entries:

Detail surveys:

Sibling layers carrying overlapping data:

  • EPO OPS (regional/epo.md) — Unitary Patent Register lives at the EPO, not the UPC. UP status, designated-state coverage, and the C0 publication marker for unitary effect are surfaced via the EPO European Patent Register service. The UPC is the court; the EPO is the registry.
  • National IP courts — many UPC cases run in parallel with national infringement / nullity actions (e.g. DE BPatG, TJ Paris). Cross-linking requires bespoke identifier mapping; not folded into either shipped UPC connector today.
  • CJEU — preliminary references the UPC may make to the CJEU on EU law questions. Coverage planned via eurlex_cellar, not a UPC surface.

Rating: 🟢 Green

Decisions feed (Drupal Views HTML harvester) + UPCA/RoP statute corpus both shipped 🟢. CMS Public Read API v5.3 (the opt-out registry path) is 🔴 — TLS-blocked at handshake for unenrolled clients; enrollment only via Athena contact form. Jump to access details → View on the atlas →

§1 Mission

The Unified Patent Court is the single supranational forum for litigating Unitary Patents and (subject to opt-out during the transitional period) traditional European Patents within the contracting EU member states. It went live 2023-06-01, jointly with the Unitary Patent system. It is not part of the CJEU/General Court system even though the Court of Appeal sits in Luxembourg; UPC and CJEU are parallel court systems that intersect only via preliminary references on EU law questions.

For agents, the UPC matters for three reasons that no other entity in the catalog covers: (1) it is the only source of substantive case law on the scope and validity of European Patents under a unified European jurisprudence (national courts produce parallel but non-binding national rulings); (2) its rules — the UPC Agreement (UPCA) and the Rules of Procedure (RoP, 18th draft in force 2022-09-01) — are themselves a novel and rapidly-developing body of substantive patent procedural law; and (3) its opt-out registry is the authoritative answer to "does the UPC have jurisdiction over this EP?", which is increasingly load-bearing for European patent strategy.

§2 What's unique here

  • UPC case law — first-instance and Court-of-Appeal decisions on EP scope, validity, infringement, and provisional measures. ~946 CFI cases by end-2025 per Bird & Bird's UPC in numbers, growing ~50% YoY. The corpus is small but the precedent value per decision is unusually high — there is no other source of UPC case law.
  • UPCA + Rules of Procedure — the substantive corpus that governs every UPC proceeding. Free PDFs on unifiedpatentcourt.org/en/court/legal-documents. No third party hosts the canonical text; the Casalonga interactive cross-reference is useful but not authoritative.
  • Opt-out registry — the only authoritative source for whether a given traditional EP has been opted out of UPC jurisdiction. Surfaced by the UPC via the CMS public search at /en/registry/opt-out (UI) and the v5.3 CMS Public Read API (/v5/opt-out/list, /v5/opt-out/patentStatus) — but the read-API host blocks unenrolled callers at TLS handshake. See §3 / §6.
  • Case-ID taxonomy — UPC_CFI_n/yyyy (Court of First Instance), UPC_CoA_n/yyyy (Court of Appeal), ACT_NNNNNN/yyyy (CMS action IDs). ECLI is not systematically assigned; downstream normalization with national EU case-law databases needs a custom map.

§3 Programmatic surfaces

Decisions and Orders index (HTML + PDF/A)

Field Value
Endpoint https://www.unifiedpatentcourt.org/en/decisions-and-orders (also /fr/..., /de/...)
Auth none
Format HTML index pages → PDF/A per decision (mandated by RoP for all UPC documents)
Rate limit not published; observed polite limits, no 429s on 1 RPS
ToS posture permissive for public-record consumption
Rating (zero-infra proxy) 🟢 Green — shipped at patent_client_agents.upc_decisions
Primary source Decisions and Orders

Drupal Views-backed listing. Per-decision detail pages at /en/node/<id> are gated by Cloudflare's interactive challenge, but the listing rows already carry every structured field needed (case ID, division, type of action, parties, PDF URL), so our harvester reads only the listing pages. Pagination via ?page=N (0-indexed) — and beware the Drupal quirk that ?page=0 renders the empty template; omit the param entirely for the first page. PDF/A attachments are not Cloudflare-gated and stream directly.

UPCA + Rules of Procedure (statutes corpus)

Field Value
Endpoint https://www.unifiedpatentcourt.org/en/court/legal-documents
Auth none
Format PDF + HTML (UPCA, Statute of the UPC = Annex I, Rules of Procedure, Rules on Court Fees and Recoverable Costs, Code of Conduct for Representatives)
Rate limit n/a — static documents
ToS posture permissive — official treaty + RoP text
Rating 🟢 Green — shipped at patent_client_agents.upc_statutes, bundled SQLite/FTS5 corpus + EN/FR/DE parallel
Primary source UPC legal documents

Frozen snapshot in a bundled SQLite/FTS5 corpus following the same StaticLawCorpus pattern as mpep, epc, ipo_in_statutes, dpma_statutes, and legifrance_ip. get_corpus_status() exposes corpus_synced_at / corpus_version for the CONNECTOR_STANDARDS §4 provenance stamp.

CMS Public Read API v5.3 (search + opt-out registry — blocked)

Field Value
Endpoint https://api-prod.unified-patent-court.org/upc/public/api/v5/ (presumed; pre-prod equivalent at api-pre-prod...)
Auth OAuth2 bearer (1800-second lifetime) — replaces the legacy X-API-KEY
Format JSON (10 GET-only paths, 64 schema definitions per swagger_v5-3.json)
Rate limit not published
ToS posture enrollment-only — registration channel undocumented as of 2026-05
Rating 🔴 Red today — read-API host rejects TLS at the network layer from unenrolled clients (no ServerHello returned). Filing-UI Keycloak credentials do not bootstrap into read-API access; they are separate systems. See connectors/upc.md §6 of the 2026-05-13 update.
Primary sources Swagger v5.3 JSON (Cloudflare-gated for direct GETs; canonical snapshot at research/openapi/upc_cms_public_api_v5-3.json); Opt-Out Register UI; v1.4 PDF (superseded)

The v5.3 spec defines /v5/cases, /v5/documents/{caseType}/{number}/{year}, /v5/documents/download/{id}, /v5/opt-out/list, /v5/opt-out/patentStatus, /v5/opt-out/statusTypes, /v5/representatives, /v5/representatives/representationEntitlements, /v5/languages, and /v5/caseTypes. Of these, /v5/opt-out/list is the highest-leverage public-API asset — it answers "is this EP opted out?". Enrollment workflow is undocumented; the Athena contact form is the only known channel. The auth model (OAuth-only vs OAuth + mTLS vs OAuth + IP allowlist) is unresolved; DigiCert/QuoVadis publishes "UPC Authentication Certificates" which is suggestive of mTLS being part of the picture but not dispositive.

A2A API (write-side, regulated)

Not in scope. The CMS A2A API is the representative-law-firm filing channel (opt-out submission and case filings). OAuth2-gated, regulated, and mis-use has live-case consequences. Skip absent a paying customer who is a UPC representative.

§4 Fees

Policy: link only. Reproducing fee amounts is not our job — fee schedules drift, and only the authoritative source is current.

The UPC publishes its fee schedule in EUR, covering case-management fees (proportional to value-in-dispute), opposition / counterclaim fees, appeal fees, fee reductions for SMEs / natural persons / non-profits / universities, and the (currently zero) opt-out / opt-out withdrawal fees. The Table of Court Fees and Recoverable Costs is adopted by the UPC Administrative Committee and consolidated in the "Rules on Court Fees and Recoverable Costs" document on the legal-documents page.

Notable discount / exemption programs (name + one-line eligibility — no amounts or dates):

  • SME / natural-person / non-profit / university discount — 40% reduction on certain fees per Table of Court Fees Pt. 1.
  • Opt-out / opt-out withdrawal — currently no fee, per the consolidated Table.

§5 Access via patent-client-agents

What we cover today

  • patent_client_agents.upc_decisions — HTML scrape of the decisions-and-orders index. Surfaces: search_decisions() (paginated, filterable by judgement_type / court_type / division / proceedings_lang), get_decision(case_id) (canonical-ID lookup; walks pages), download_decision_pdf(url) (PDF/A binary), plus list_divisions() / list_languages() to discover filter IDs. Case-ID canonicalization handles all observed source variants (UPC_CFI_1747/2025, UPC-CFI-478/2025, UPC_CFI_0001695/2025, UPC_CoA_335/2023, UPC-COA-35/2026, ACT_551054/2023).
  • patent_client_agents.upc_statutes — bundled SQLite/FTS5 corpus of UPCA + Statute (= Annex I) + RoP + Court Fees Rules + Code of Conduct. Instrument aliases accepted (upca, rop, rules of procedure, fees, coc, statute). EN/FR/DE parallel. search() supports and / or / adj / exact syntax via FTS5 with BM25 ranking; get_instrument() returns full text; get_corpus_status() returns snapshot date / version for §4 provenance stamping.

What we could add

  1. Decision PDF/A text extraction — neither connector parses the PDF body today; callers fetch the binary and OCR / extract themselves. A decision_text(case_id) helper that runs pdfminer against the PDF/A would unlock "find decisions discussing inventive step" agentic flows. The corpus is small enough (~thousands of decisions, not millions) that bulk extraction is tractable.
  2. CMS Public Read API client — upc_cms with the v5.3 surface, gated on enrollment resolution (§6 #1). High-leverage if/when enrollment opens up: /v5/opt-out/list and /v5/opt-out/patentStatus would let us answer "is this EP opted out?" programmatically, pairing with epo_ops UP-aware helpers for a complete EP-status picture. The OAuth2 scaffold is already battle-tested by euipo_* (OAuth2ClientCredentialsAuth in law_tools_core.oauth2); ~2-3 days end-to-end if auth turns out to be OAuth-only, longer if mTLS is required.
  3. EPO OPS UP-aware helpers — get_unitary_patent_package(ep_number), get_upc_opt_out_status(ep_number). The UP register lives at the EPO, not the UPC, and OPS already exposes C0 + B7000 / B920 markers for unitary effect. These would live in epo_ops, not a UPC module.
  4. Decision metadata enrichment — link each row's parties to canonical applicant entities, add procedural-language detection, normalize division names to a stable taxonomy. Useful for analytics but not load-bearing for the v1 connector.

Next steps

  1. Submit the Athena contact-form enrollment query drafted in connectors/upc.md §6 — this is the only documented channel to resolve the CMS Public Read API enrollment workflow. Until that's answered, the read API stays blocked at 🔴 red.
  2. Spec the EPO OPS UP helpers as a small follow-on PR against epo_ops (not a new module) — cheap, unblocks "is this EP opted out?" via the OPS register markers without needing UPC CMS enrollment.
  3. Watch PMAC opening (2026-06-02) — the Patent Mediation and Arbitration Centre may publish anonymized awards / consent decrees, either as a separate feed or folded into the existing decisions registry. Watch-list item.

§6 Known unknowns

  • CMS Public Read API enrollment. Pending the Athena-form response. Specifically: (a) is read-API enrollment separate from CMS Filing UI signup, (b) does it require a QuoVadis/DigiCert client TLS cert (mTLS), (c) does it require source-IP allowlisting, and (d) what is the canonical public-facing base URL (the Swagger's host: upcbe is an internal placeholder).
  • Long-term API stability. The UPC's own public developer documentation is young — the v1.4 PDF (Feb 2023) is still linked from /en/registry/it-developers despite being superseded by v5.3 Swagger. Expect further surface drift through 2026-2027 as the new-CMS rollout completes.
  • Opt-out withdrawal asymmetry. Opt-out creation is over the A2A API; withdrawal of an existing opt-out is web-UI-only via the CMS Front Office. That's a hard product constraint — agents using any opt-out write surface must understand the asymmetry.
  • Decisions feed text extraction quality. PDF/A decisions vary in layout extractability across divisions. A spot-check across 10 decisions per division is required before committing to a structured "decision text" feed (Open Q #5 in the detail survey).
  • ECLI assignment. UPC doesn't natively assign ECLIs. Cross-linking to national EU case-law databases (eurlex_cellar, planned de_caselaw) requires either synthetic ECLI:EU:UPC:yyyy:nnn identifiers (risky — not official) or native UPC_*/yyyy IDs with a sidecar map. Default to native + optional sidecar.
  • PMAC data surface (2026-06-02 onward). Will the Patent Mediation and Arbitration Centre publish a structured feed of awards / consent decrees, or fold into the existing UPC decisions registry?

§7 References

Primary sources only.

Court + court structure:

Data feeds:

Substantive law:

Enrollment / contact:

Detail survey:

  • connectors/upc.md — 2026-05 detail survey including the 2026-05-13 empirical CMS-API enrollment probe (§6 update)

Last updated 2026-05-18.