Mr. Günter Verheugen, Vice-President of the European Commission and responsible for Enterprise and Industry, recently argued on a SME-Conference held in Brussels on April 26th, 2006, titled "Financing European Enterprise" as follows:
"[...] However, Europe has not been able to fully benefit from its science and innovation base. Rapid commercialisation of ideas and research happens too rarely in Europe and we often let others to commercialise our ideas.
For example, next week on 2 May at the European Inventor of the year awards, Karlheinz Brandenburg who invented the MP3 format and revolutionised the world of music while he was a postgraduate student at the University of Erlangen in southern Germany is one of 3 nominees for a lifetime achievement award. If finally selected, I suspect this well deserved prize will not be presented to him by the patent examiner in Munich who rejected his original patent application firmly convinced that music could not be fed down a phone line. Today, thanks to the Internet, MP3 is the international standard for audio-coding. More than 200 million people have installed a software player on their computers and sales of MP3 players topped 50 million last year. How unfortunate it is though that the scepticism of the patent examiner was also shared by the EU industry and that the commercialisation of Mr Brandenburg's invention has primarily benefited a US company. As for Mr Brandenburg, he is now the director of the Fraunhofer Institute for Digital Media Technology in Ilmenau and the holder of 25 patents, with several more pending. It is crystal clear that innovative research is not the problem. What we need is to be able toe to benefit more from our research and innovation. For this, we need more risk taking, more vision - and more finance.
This brings me to the theme of the day - how to ensure that European enterprises get financing for their growth. [...]"
Hm ... it might be really interesting to learn more on the case by means of an epoline on-line file inspection. However, if the application in question should really be EP 89902498, then we are out of luck - it hasn't been scanned yet and perhaps will never be because of the paper files are since long destroyed.
[UPDATE] 2006-04-28 I think that I'd got the application number wrong. More likely, the patent application in question might have been No. 87905587 published as EP 0 287 578 B1. The file is available for epoline inspection. At a first glance, this file looks as if the application would have been examined throroughly. Isn't that exactly what we want to see in view of the ongoing patent quality discussion?
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Dipl.-Phys. Axel H Horns is Patentanwalt (German Patent Attorney),
European Patent Attorney as well as European Trade Mark Attorney. In particular, he is Member of:
argued on a SME-Conference held in Brussels on April 26th, 2006, titled "Financing European Enterprise" as follows:
