Brussels, 26/06/2015 (Agence Europe) - On Wednesday 24 June, the member states gave their blessing to plans to cut the costs of renewing the European unitary patent, which will ultimately drop from an average of €30,000 to €5,000, bringing the cost down sixfold.
“After decades of negotiations on the unitary patent (…), we have taken a major step towards its completion”, said the Commissioner for the Single Market and Industry, Elzbieta Bienkowska. This reduction, which was decided upon by the member states meeting in a restricted ad hoc committee, will apply to the ten-year renewal of the patent among the 25 member states involved in the enhanced cooperation. “The agreement reached on the level of the costs will help us to reduce the gap between the costs of the protection afforded by European patents and those of the US, Japan and other countries”, the Polish Commissioner explained.
This reduction in the cost of the patents does, however, come with a few quid pro quos, such as reducing the number of languages in the translation regime of the unitary patent to three, namely German, English and French, much to the displeasure of some member states, such as Spain. Having brought the matter before the Court of Justice of the EU on the grounds of infringement of the principle of non-discrimination on the basis of language, Madrid lost its fight in May, when the Court ruled that the regime was proportionate (see EUROPE 11308). However, a machine translation system will be developed for the other European languages.
After 30 years of negotiations and unsuccessful attempts, the Council and the European Parliament reached an agreement on the 'patent' package: the 'unitary package' (regulation no. 1257/2012), the language regime (regulation no. 1260/2012) and the unified patent jurisdiction.
A path strewn with pitfalls. The implementation of the unitary patent was initially scheduled for 2014, but the dossier was held up over a number of questions and uncertainties, particularly regarding the unified jurisdiction of the patent, which comes under an international intergovernmental treaty, in other words outside the Community framework. So far, just seven states have ratified the treaty. 13 are required, including the first three countries to have filed patents, Germany, France and the United Kingdom, to allow the treaty to enter into force, a European source close to the dossier told EUROPE. However, the referendum plans of the British Prime Minister, David Cameron, on keeping the UK in the European Union could jeopardise the project, or at least slow it down considerably, the source added.
The end of May, the 'Competitiveness' Council took stock of the progress made and recommended a reduction of the renewal costs. The most optimistic forecasts hope to see the first European unitary patent issued by the European Patent Office (EPO) in 2016. (Pascal Hansens)