MEPs make moves to clarify patent progress
The European Parliament's legal affairs committee addressed the three areas which have proved the major obstacles to progress in the creation of European community patent on 20 February. Proposals concerning the role of the national patent offices, the judicial system used and the linguistic regime of patents were all adopted by the committee in amendments to the proposal for a regulation on the introduction of Community patent. National patent offices should retain a significant role according to the text prepared by rapporteur, Spanish MEP Ana Palacio Vallersundi and adopted by the committee. This is particularly so in the areas of advising patent applications and transmitting patent requests to the European patent office (EPO). The staff and infrastructure of the national offices are a valuable asset, but harmonisation criteria would need to be set out and monitored to ensure quality and uniformity under a Community patent. Quality control overseeing this procedure would come under the authority of the European Commission in collaboration with the EPO. On judicial arrangements, the committee agreed that there should be decentralisation of the degree of first instance judicial system, ensuring both proximity to users and full exploitation of the existing resources. Finally, on the linguistic regime, the amendment called for application of an existing regulation passed to deal with the Community trademark that was passed in 1993. This outlines that requests are lodged in one of the languages of the European Union with specification of a second language chosen from English, French, German, Spanish or Italian. This second language is chosen for any procedures relating to opposition to, expiry or invalidation of the patent. In a separate development, the European Commission presented a proposal for a Directive on 20 February that would provide patent protection for computer-implemented inventions. According to Internal market Commissioner, Frits Bolkestein, the proposal does not mean any changes in what can and can't be patented, but does provide a break in US approach to patenting just software.