THE ITALIAN ACCESSION TO THE EU UNITARY PATENT AND TO THE UNIFIED PATENT COURT Italy has finally announced its official participation to the enhanced Cooperation on the European Patent with unitary effect (the so called European Unitary Patent, established by EU Regulation n.1257/12, and to be distinguished from the well known traditional European patent, delivered by the European Patent Office in Munich). This enhanced cooperation, which is a EU Treaties legal provision permitting a majority of EU Member States to go ahead by agreement when unanimity cannot be attained, concerns for the time being 26 EU Member States, Spain having decided so far not to be part of this cooperation because of the official language regime which is limited to English, French and German, whereas Croatia is not yet in. At her meeting the last 10th September with Mr Benoît Battistelli, President of the European Patent Office (EPO, Munich), Ms Simona Vicari, Deputy State-Secretary in the Italian Ministry of Economic Development, has also announced that Italy will sign very soon the 2013 International Agreement on the Unified Patent Court (UPC), currently under ratification and expected to enter into force in 2016. The UPC is the judicial system for settling litigations in the participating States of both classical European Patents and the new European Unitary Patents. It’s now up to the European Commission to evaluate the Italian request, which appears nevertheless to be a pure formality. According to Mr Battistelli the Italian accession to the Unitary System will improve the interest and the preference for the EU Unitary Patent, both for the EU firms and those outside the EU, given the importance of the Italian market and the great number of the patent holders which request their prerogative to be extended to the Italian peninsula. The Italian accession to the EU new unitary system will constitute not only an important step forward in the process of European integration in a very sensitive economical and business sector of the old Continent, but it will mean for all small and medium-sized enterprises (Italian and European) an 80% reduction of their annual fees as well as the advantage of an effective judicial protection of their inventions all over the EU. This will be possible thanks to a unified procedure that allows a substantial reduction in the legal costs and put an end to the multiplication of disputes (one for each State in which an infringement/counterfeit has occurred), hence considerably strengthening legal certainty.