The agreement reached, on 2 December, by the Polish Presidency and the representatives of the European Parliament on the main direction of the future EU patent has received the green light from the member states’ representatives (Committee of Permanent Representatives). The agreement concerns the draft regulation that implements enhanced cooperation (involving 25 member states – Italy and Spain are not participating) for the creation of a unitary patent protection.

It also concerns provisions that are broached in two other chapters of this package: the proposal for a regulation on the linguistic regime of the future patent; and the draft intergovernmental agreement establishing the jurisdictional system. This global approval stems from a condition posed by Parliament, which wants to be associated to all the aspects of the future patent given the complex interconnections between the different subjects. Parliament is requesting that a final agreement only be reached if the green light is first given on each chapter. The Council agreed to this demand, specifying that it did not want the tricky balance reached on the translations chapter to be challenged.

The three rapporteurs – Bernhard Rapkay (S&D, Germany), Raffaele Baldassarre (EPP, Italy) and Klaus-Heiner Lehne (EPP, Germany) – tried (with partial success) to arrive at some progress in terms of translation for SMEs, non-profit associations, legal persons or university and public research bodies. The rapporteurs stressed that since the translation costs would be heavier for these small structures, the planned instrument to compensate translation fees for patent applications made in a language other than one of the three official European Patent Office (EPO) languages should be dedicated exclusively to them. Applications can be made in any EU language but will have to be accompanied by a full translation in one of the three official languages. A summary will also have to be provided in the other two languages. A transition period (12 years maximum) is planned until a system providing quality machine translation is available. During that period an additional full translation will have to be carried out: patents delivered in French or German will have to be translated into English; patents delivered in English will have to be translated into another EU official language. The EP’s request for a mandatory full translation into English during that transition period has been approved.

See: Europolitics