Brussels, 27/07/2010 (Agence Europe) - The Council's national intellectual property experts will meet on Wednesday 28 July to discuss the recent proposal for a regulation setting out the language regime for the new EU patent put by the European Commission at the start of July (see EUROPE 10172). The meting will focus on the impact study on which the legislative proposal is based. The meeting will give two member states, Spain and Italy, the opportunity to detail their criticisms of the regime being put forward. This regime, modelled on the current system in the European Patents Office (EPO) which been charged with bringing forward the European patent, provides for patent applications being filed in one of the three official EPO languages (English, French and German) and for the compulsory translation of patent claims into the other two languages. Electronic translations into other languages will have no legal value.
Spain is particularly annoyed at this legislative proposal. Refusing to accept that a translation into Spanish of a patent should have no legal value, it is drafting an alternative proposal which it will put to national delegations in September. If the least expensive solution was wanted, then English would be the only patent language, a European source remarked.
Last week, Italy, whose position is close to Spain's, wrote to European Multilingualism Commissioner Androulla Vassiliou to argue for Italian to be used in the European institutions. Its European Affairs Minister Andrea Ronchi said the recent proposal from Internal Market Commissioner Michel Barnier on the language regime for the EU patent was an example of attempts by the European institutions to impose de facto tri-lingualism, based on no legal standard or formal decision. Such a legislative proposal would give unfair advantages to the member states whose official languages are English, French and/or German and would have a serious impact in terms of competition and companies' competitiveness, he says in the letter, a copy of which has been obtained by EUROPE. The minister, expressing his great puzzlement, opines that the proposal would seem to underpin the clear objective of making English, French and German the EU's working languages.
At a first meeting of national experts on the legislative proposal, Italy questioned some of the figures in the Commission's impact study. In particular, it challenged the cost of translating a patent, claiming that this would only be half the €85 per page the Commission calculated. Consequently, the cost of a European patent would not be ten times that of a patent filed in the United States, but four times. (M.B./transl.rt)