EUROPE: Is an EU patent on the way at last?

The European Commission - the executive of the European Union - has published proposals that could eliminate one of the most tiresome and costly of the obstacles to successful exploitation of innovation in the union: the lack of an EU-wide patent.

Commission officials say if the EU Council of Ministers accepts proposed new arrangements for text translation, the costs of patenting inventions and technical advances across the EU could fall drastically.

Despite the existence of the European Patent Office in Munich, Germany, taking out a patent which works across Europe today costs 10 times more than in the US because validation of the document has to be sought at the national level, creating administrative and translation costs.

In practice most inventors only patent their inventions in a very limited number of EU countries to limit these costs. The Commission says the present system "discourages research, development and innovation, and undermines Europe's competitiveness".

It is proposing a new EU-wide system, built on the successful three-language system (English, French and German) currently used at the European Patent Office, which would "drastically reduce existing translation costs".

Brussels has been trying for over a decade to bring in an EU-wide patent and its ideas were agreed by the member states in 2009 - though the deal excluded translation arrangements.

Under the new system, which will now be presented to member countries for agreement and which the Commission says is the final part of the package, one of those three languages must be used for the text of the patent. The Commission says "no further translations into other languages will be required from the patent proprietor except in the case of a legal dispute concerning the EU patent".

So there will be no need to translate those patents into Estonian, Latvian and Maltese in future.

alan.osborn@uw-news.com