Wanted: a patent system to inspire and protect

Success in the drive to boost Europe’s powers of innovation will depend on providing companies with effective ways of protecting their ideas from theft or copying.

Battling to break a deadlock of almost 40 years on the issue of patent protection, the EU is in danger of losing valuable ground to rapidly-rising economies such as India.

Property rights are the bedrock of any functioning market economy. According to research released this month by ProTon Europe, an association of knowledge-transfer offices, patent filing rates in the EU are 20% lower than in the US. One of the main reasons is said to be the high cost of defending patents in the EU.

Much of the cost of defending European patents is accounted for by translation fees. Translation of patents, whether obtained from local administrations or from the European Patent Office, a non-EU body which is an arm of the 31-country European Patent Organisation (EPO), is needed for validity in different EU jurisdictions. For a company operating in all 27 member states, this would mean translation of patents into the 23 official EU?languages.

The idea of a low-cost, high-quality EU patent remains, for the time being, a distant prospect. From the time it was first suggested in the 1960s, bickering over which languages should be used to draw up patents has blocked progress. As a means of side-stepping the issue, Charlie McCreevy, the European commissioner for internal market, last year proposed that the EU should sign up to the European Patent Litigation Agreement (EPLA), an EPO solution that would have created a pan-European court outside EU jurisdiction. But his idea was rejected by a number of countries led by France.

Forced back to the drawing board, McCreevy in April proposed an integrated system combining legal provisions paving the way for a community patent and elements of the draft EPLA. McCreevy floated the possibility of creating a European Patent Judiciary subject to the European Court of Justice that could oversee EPO patents and, eventually, community patents. Industry ministers are set to discuss options at a meeting in Brussels on 26-27 July.

Success in the drive to boost Europe’s powers of innovation will depend on providing companies with effective ways of protecting their ideas from theft or copying.