EU seeks to end European patent impasse

By ROBERT WIELAARD

BRUSSELS

Seeking to end years of impasse, the European Commission proposed Thursday to issue EU-wide patents in French, Germany or English only and do away with national patents valid only in the issuing country.

Michel Barnier, the European Union single market commissioner, said to compete with the United States, Japan and other technological powers the EU must "encourage innovation. That's not the case today. It is far too expensive and complicated to obtain a patent."

Today, there are national patents in national languages -- valid only in issuing countries -- and those of the European Patent Office, in English, French and German.

The latter must now be translated, in part or entirely, into the languages of the 27 EU nations and 10 non-EU neighbors to be legal effect there. While EU nations agreed in 2003 to move to an EU patent system, they have disagreed on how to simplify the linguistic hodgepodge.

Barnier proposed to use only English, French and German, the working languages of the Munich-based EPO.

A European Patent validated for use in 13 countries now costs up to euro20,000, of which euro14,000 arise from translations alone.

"This makes a European Patent more than 10 times more expensive than an American patent which costs about euro1,850," he said.

He added if only English, German and French are used across the EU, the "processing costs for an EU Patent for 27 nations would be less than euro6,200, of which only 10 percent would be due to translations."

Italy and Spain have long insisted their languages be given equal time to English, German and French. EU sources said Barnier is denying their request for fear others will follow suit.

In 2009, the EPO granted 134,542 patents, evenly split between Europe and other parts of the world. Germany topped the list of EU patent applications (25,107), followed by France (8,929), the Netherlands (6,738), Britain (4,821) and Italy (3,881).

Barnier said the current patent validation system "means that many patents are now not protected." He said that translates into 200,000 lost jobs.

Belgioum, which holds the EU presidency in the second half of the year, wants a deal on the EU patent language regime by December at the latest.

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Online:

http://ec.europa.eu/internal--market/indprop/patent/index--en.htm