Brussels, 03/10/2006 (Agence Europe) - The European Association of Craft, Small and Medium-sized Enterprises (UEAPME) “cautiously” welcomed in a press statement, the declarations made by Charlie McCreevy, European Commissioner for the internal market, during a parliamentary debate last week (EUROPE 9276) on future Commission action in the area of patents in Europe. It warns that the European Patent Litigation Agreement (EPLA), “must not be seen as a replacement to the European Community Patent and should not encourage misgranting of software patents under any circumstances”.
Maria Cimaglia, legal advisor to the UEAPM declared, “A workable EPLA should foresee local Courts of First Instance with the relevant technical knowledge in every Member State, working alongside an appeal Europe-wide Patent Court”. She also highlighted the need to minimise costs of legal proceedings for Small and Medium-sized Enterprises (SME). She added that Europe level rulings allow for a “homogenous interpretation” of patent law “reducing risks of getting diverging decisions by various courts and increasing legal certainty both for patent holders and third parties”. Cimaglia affirmed that, “While the EPLA may ease the litigation-related burden for SMEs, it does not touch upon other issues such as filing procedures” and that, “A Community Patent is still the best option in this respect.
The UEAPME also expressed the fear that the EPLA could be used for introducing patents on software “through the backdoor…The European Patent Office policy towards software patents has been very liberal so far. Applying the EPLA to software patents granted by the EPO would create a dangerous body of jurisprudence on an issue which was clearly discarded by the European Parliament and by European stakeholders one year ago”. With the absence of an agreement between opponents and partisans of the software patent, in July 2005, the EP rejected in a second reading, the draft directive on computer assisted inventions (EUROPE 8985). (mb)