When an unjustified threat becomes a tort: UK Patents Act §70 explained

There is one piece of UK statute that does more to shape Patent Radar's user interface than every Stripe pricing guide combined. It is Section 70 of the UK Patents Act 1977, as amended by the Intellectual Property (Unjustified Threats) Act 2017.

What the statute actually says

Section 70 makes it actionable for any person to threaten infringement proceedings if those threats turn out to be unjustified. The aggrieved person can sue for an injunction and damages. Liability is strict: the threatener does not need to know the threat is unjustified.

Crucially, the rule applies to anyone who communicates the threat. That includes platforms, consultants, automated tools and, by extension, products that generate language for a buyer to send onward.

Why this is the load-bearing rule for Patent Radar

If Patent Radar's output were forwarded to an accused party, in full or in summary, and the accusation turned out to be unjustified, the tort attaches. The rights holder is liable. Their solicitor's professional indemnity policy gets a phone call. We get sued for materially enabling it.

So we engineered the product to keep evidence with the rights holder only. We do not draft demand letters. We do not surface a button labelled 'send to alleged infringer'. We do not maintain a customer-facing API endpoint that lets you bulk-export a hit and email it to a third party. And we tell every visitor on the trust page exactly that.

Equivalent regimes in the EU

Germany, the Netherlands and Ireland all have substantively similar unjustified-threats statutes. Patent Radar's customer-facing surfaces apply the most conservative reading across all of these. The platform behaves the same whether the customer is a London TTO or a Munich patent boutique.

What this means for buyers

Two things. First, you can use Patent Radar's output to brief your patent attorney faster, more cheaply, and with cleaner provenance than you would get from a 24-page PDF an associate drafted at midnight. Second, you cannot use Patent Radar's output to short-circuit your attorney. We make the evidence, your attorney makes the legal call.

If that's the deal you want, we are built for you. If you want a tool that drafts cease and desist letters, we are deliberately not built for you.