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Thursday, March 11, 2004

NEWSFLASH: The EU Community Patent is dead.

EUpolitix.com comes with fresh news from

today's session of the Council of the European Union:

"Years of national bickering continue on Thursday as EU governments failed to broker a concessionary deal over the creation of a European patent system.

EU national competition and trade ministers convening at a council meeting in Brussels could not come to agreement over the controversial patent scheme – three decades after the plan was first conceived.

And the Irish government, chairing the meeting under the EU’s rotational presidency, issued a downbeat warning to lawmakers: “We are further away from an agreement than in November”. [...]

And it is this language question that continues to divide EU states – both in the delays of translating patent claims and the validity of patents with errors in their translation.

EU member states retain the right to translate the patent claims into national langauges for effect in the union.

The European Commission, in a watered-down bid to push the laws through, tabled a compromise offer of a nine month threshold for the delay – to no avail.

Indeed Germany on Thursday, one of the largest member states, pushed for a 12-month limit as a minimum requirement. [...]"

In principle, it would be a nice idea to have something like a EU Community Patent. So far and on the one hand, this is bad news, but not coming unexpectedly.

On the other hand, this is also goods news: The EU deserves a better approach than that which formed the basis of the current deliberations in the Council, and the failure to reach a compromise also means that a botchy pseudo-solution for a unified EU patent system could be avoided. The commitment to a full duty to translate into all EU languages had corrupted the idea of a Community Patent from an early stage on.

In practice, the EU Community Patent would have been dead on arrival if it would have been agreed upon on the basis of the pending proposal because of the main users of the patent system surely would have preferred the old EPO bundle patent.

There had been a much better approach issued by the industry: Just accepting a one-language EU Community Patent in English.

EurActiv.com had reported:

"[...] Thierry Sueur, responsible for intellectual property at the French business union (MEDEF) and Vice-Chairman of the Patent Working Group at UNICE, said he was in favour of a single-language system to eliminate translation costs. He argued that translations were read by only a fraction of researchers anyway and that litigations would then be reduced to almost nothing.

He was supported in this view by Arian Duijvestijn, patent portfolio Manager at Philips, who called on Europeans to stop spending time and money on internal patent fights and to battle on the international scene against the US and China. [...]"

Doing so would have been a pragmatic and wise idea. But this is now not the situation in which we stand.

There is another positive aspect of the Council's failure which should not be overlooked: If the EU Community Patent is definitively dead for the coming decades, the prospects for the

European Patent Litigation Agreement EPLA to be implemented might rise. And the EPLA surely will be better for Europe than the

patents court system as intended by the Commission in conjunction with the Community Patent because of EPLA is more de-centralised.

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BLOG@IP::JUR

Patent Attorney Axel H Horns' Blog on Intellectual Property Law.

Thursday, March 11, 2004

NEWSFLASH: The EU Community Patent is dead.

VPP