Brussels, 06/12/2011 (Agence Europe) - The European patent, the idea of which is to reduce the cost to businesses of protecting inventions and which has been spoken about for over 20 years, is still not ready to become a reality. The ministers responsible for competitiveness of the 25 countries engaged in enhanced cooperation on this issue (Italy and Spain have declined to take part because of the linguistic regime), meeting on Monday evening 5 December, were unable to come to agreement on all points, with disagreement on where the dispute settlement court should have its headquarters and more work still to be done on how this body is to be funded.
“It's fair to say that we have never been so close to resolution”, said a Council source but “we're not there yet”, even though consensus has been reached on a number of points and indeed agreement found with the European Parliament (EP) on 1 December.
On Monday evening, with France and also Germany and the United Kingdom looking to secure the headquarters of the main dispute settlement body for themselves, this issue proved a stumbling block. Ministers came to agreement, however, on basing the court of appeal in Luxembourg and the court of patent arbitration and mediation in Lisbon and Ljubljana.
Other points remain to be decided: how this court architecture is to be financed, with it ultimately having to be self-financing. Money, however, will be needed to launch the system and the states party to the enhanced cooperation have yet to decide “from where and from whom this funding should come”, a source revealed.
The Polish Presidency of the EU Council intends to resolve these not insignificant points as quickly as possible, it said after the ministerial meeting. This will have to be before 22 December when the international agreement allowing the creation of this dispute settlement court is to be initialled in Warsaw. Before then, the Presidency will hold bilateral discussions to remove the final obstacles, the Council source said.
For the remainder - arrangements on creating a unitary patent and the linguistic regime - the path has been cleared over the last few weeks and “everything is more or less alright”. Under the terms of the agreement reached with the EP, the linguistic regime for the issue of patents will be trilingual - English, French and German - though applications may be submitted in any of the official languages of the EU. Fees for translation from a language other than the three official regime languages may be compensated. In terms of the creation of the patent, the deal reached will allow inventors from countries currently outside the procedure to apply for a Community patent and specific provisions have been introduced to allow small businesses to be granted reductions and other savings in the costs of renewing patents. (SP/transl.rt)