Brussels, 28/09/2001 (Agence Europe) - The Belgian Council Presidency has called on Member States to make concessions in order to reach agreement over the Community patent by the end of the year, in line with the requests of the Feria and Stockholm European Summits. At a dinner behind closed doors at the Internal Market Council on Thursday, the Ministers had a very involved discussion of this difficult issue. I have the feeling that if we want to respect the deadline, we will have to propose a text in November that can broadly balance out the different sides' interests, commented the President of the Internal Market Council, Belgian Economics Minister Charles Picqué. He warned that inevitably some countries would have to make concessions over areas of disagreement like the role of national patent offices, the competent jurisdiction or the linguistic regime, but he concluded that while he would be lying if he suggested it would be easy, as Commissioner Bolkestein had said, they should not distance themselves too much from the initial proposal and end up with a pseudo-Community patent.
The Council did, however, make progress on the Design Regulation, a kind of "poor relation of the patent" that will be managed by the European Office for Harmonisation in the Internal Market in Alicante. Belgium, Portugal and Greece have dropped their reservations about the linguistic regime, which means that designs will have to be processed in English, French, German, Italian and Spanish. Once the technical fine-tuning of the text is complete, it should be possible to adopt the Regulation shortly without debate.
While strongly restating his case on patents, Spanish Minister Ramon de Miguel welcomed the progress that had been made on the Community Design Regulation. This gives the Presidency reason not to despair about trying to get Spain, the most intransigent country in terms of the linguistic regime for the Community patent and the role of the national offices, to relax its position. Italian Minister Rocco Buttiglione told journalists that the adoption of the patent was a priority for the Italian government, adding that while the negotiations had not yet been concluded, there was a very strong desire to reach a result because the patent is important in terms of enabling European countries to compete with the United States. (Italy is insisting that the patent claims be translated into Italian, see EUROPE of 26 September, p.10.)
Next week, the Presidency will be launching a series of bilateral meetings or "confessionals" with Member States to assess how much room for manoeuvre exists on the different areas of a future compromise text (see EUROPE of 24 and 25 September, p.12).