The Unified Patent Court (UPC) has announced today that it has temporarily restricted certain functions of the CMS in order to maximise capacity to ensure that users who want to file opt-outs in the sunrise period, i.e. before the Court opens on 1 June, can do so. In particular, all public APIs have been discontinued, including those allowing external users to retrieve a list of opt-out cases linked to a patent number or the list of representatives in the system. The announcement concludes: “Be sure that we are closely monitoring the performance of the CMS to ensure we will be able to handle all opt-outs before the end of the Sunrise, whether they are filed via API or via CMS front end.”

As reported here, last week the UPC published measures being taken to improve the CMS’ capacity and asked users to limit use of APIs by avoiding multiple requests of statuses and receipts of opt-outs, and it also suggested that the last bulk batch of opt-outs (in the sunrise period) is sent before 16.00 CET 30 May as the CMS will be offline from 9.00 CET 31 May until 9.00 CET 1 June and APIs will be unavailable.