Brand owners and other IP right holders will be interested to hear that the UK Government has today announced it is maintaining its "UK+ regime" of exhaustion of intellectual property rights.
The “UK+ regime” is a bespoke regional exhaustion regime, which has been in place since the end of the Brexit transition period in January 2021. In general terms, this regime ensures that relevant IP rights in goods are exhausted in the UK when a good is placed on the market in either the UK or the European Economic Area.
IP right holders would have been in a stronger position if the UK had adopted a solely national exhaustion regime, where relevant IP rights in goods were exhausted in the UK only when they are put on our domestic market. That would have hindered EU parallel importation, but is not considered to be reconcilable with the Northern Ireland Protocol to the UK-EU Withdrawal Agreement, now amended by the Windsor Framework.
However, the chosen path is not the worst case scenario of international exhaustion, where IP right holders would also have faced parallel importation from everywhere outside the EEA.
