Intellectual Property

The Community patent

The European Commission published a proposal for a community patent in August 2000. A Community patent would, when granted, automatically be valid across the European Union. It was agreed at a political level that only the claims of a Community patent would have to be translated into the languages of member states. It would be judged under Community law, meaning that if it was declared invalid by the European Court it would be invalid in the whole of Europe. However, talks on the Community patent had stalled in 2004 over the question of legal effect of translation.

The proposal differs from the current European Patent (EP) available from the European Patent Office (EPO), where you are required, subject to meeting the legal and administrative standards, to translate the patent into the language of each member state. Therefore the Community patent would help reduce the translation costs as well as simplifying the procedures for obtaining and litigating patents in Europe.

The Slovenian presidency published a document External Link on 28 February 2008, setting out details on machine translations, flexibility in the community patent system and fee distribution. The aim of this document was to explore the practical dynamics around the issues of contention in previous discussion. A new document External Link was tabled following this working group which gave more detailed proposals on translation arrangements based on computer translations, and provided a sample of distribution criteria for revenue. This document was discussed on the 15 May 2008. Discussions on the Community patent are continuing.

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