Brussels, 22/11/2001 (Agence Europe) - The Belgian EU Council Presidency is beginning a last chance marathon to seek a compromise on the Community patent at the Internal Market Council of 26 November, or at least before the end of its term of office, as it had been invited to do at the Lisbon Summit in March 2000. The Presidency remains "optimistic and continues to feel bound by an obligation to achieve results", said one Belgian diplomat. More likely at this stage is that Monday's Council will, at best, simply define "guiding principles", one European source considers. The Permanent Representatives of Member States with the EU should return to the issue on Friday evening.
Despite a long series of bilateral meetings between the Presidency and the Member States and a whole night's work on the matter from Wednesday to Thursday, the EU Permanent Representatives did not reach agreement on any of the controversial points: (1) the role of national patents offices, the definition of their task and the arrangements for this delegation: Spain and the United Kingdom still insist that national offices should keep an important role; France, Italy, Ireland, Belgium and Luxembourg call for the central role of the future patents office not to be led off track; (2) the linguistic regime: Spain and Italy, above all, urge for the linguistic regime to be extended to beyond the three languages currently used at the Patents Office in Munich (French, English and German), while most States insist that the linguistic regime should not bear too heavily on the cost of patents; (3) appeal and first instance jurisdictions: Germany mainly advocates decentralised jurisdiction, which poses constitutional problems for several Member States. France is particularly reticent.
In a press release published this week, the representative of the European employers' confederation, UNICE, welcomed the efforts deployed by the Belgian Presidency while stating it is increasingly concerned about the last results of discussions. "Member States seem to have lost track of the objective stated in Lisbon: to ensure that EU-wide patent protection in the Union is as simple and inexpensive to obtain and as comprehensive in its scope as the protection granted by key competitors", says UNICE, announcing that it "cannot support a political compromise that does not meet the needs of innovative companies and inventors in terms of user-friendliness and cost of protection". Rather than such a compromise, it would be better to not have a Community patent and to concentrate on the European patent currently issued by the Munich office, warned the European employers.