Parliament gives final nod to EU patent
The European Union took a step closer to an EU-wide patent with lawmakers voting to cut the cost of protecting inventions and a top advisor to Europe’s highest court rejecting a challenge to the new scheme. Twenty-five of the EU’s 27 industry ministers agreed on Monday to allow inventors to register their idea with one EU agency, signing off on a project first put forward in 1973 but which was delayed by a series of disputes, including over where to site the new patent office. The European Parliament voted yesterday in favour of the plan which will see a common patent in place on 1 January 2014, if the judges in the highest EU court dismiss objections by Spain and Italy when they make a definitive ruling next year. At a time when competition in new inventions is increasing, not only from Silicon Valley but also from Asia, a single patent is seen as encouraging innovation. "A common European patent is key to strengthening Europe’s competitiveness in a globalised world," said Swedish liberal lawmaker Cecilia Wikström. "We must be able to compete with the US, Japan and other developed countries when it comes to commercialising innovations," she said. The current system makes the process 18 times more expensive than in the United States and 60 times more than in China, because patents have to be registered separately in individual EU countries – up to 27 times to cover the whole European Union. Spain and Italy have so far refused to back the deal because the new regime stipulates the official languages for patents as English, French and German, so it will apply to 25 rather than 27 EU states initially. Court official rejects language objections But in Luxembourg, Yves Bot, an advocate general in the European Court of Justice, rejected their argument against the scheme in a non-binding opinion on Tuesday. He said the judges, who are expected to rule next year, should reject the objections of Spain and Italy. While they are not required to agree with Bot, the ECJ’s judges often follow the recommendations of the court’s advocates general. An EU patent, which will still cost more than double the US level at about €5,000 on average, will not revolutionise innovation in Europe overnight. But the reform is good for business at a time when Americans obtained four times as many patents as Europeans did in 2011. Source: EurActiv