As part of a drive to stimulate economic growth and employment, the Competitiveness Council of the European Union has recently been discussing translation arrangements for a future European patent system.
On 2 July 2010, the European Commission submitted a draft Regulation to the Competitiveness Council for consideration. The draft Regulation aims at building upon the existing language regime of the European Patent Office. Currently at grant, the claims of a European patent must be translated into the two other official EPO languages (English, German or French). The patent must then be ‘validated’ individually in the European countries where patent protection is sought, which often requires additional translations.
The European Commission proposes a new EU patent system, in addition to the current European patent system which consists of a bundle of national patents.
Applications under both systems would be treated identically under the European Patent Convention until grant. At grant, applicants would have the option of nominating between an EU patent providing uniform protection throughout all 27 member states of the EU and a European patent covering a relatively limited number of member states, depending on where validation took place.
In the case of an EU patent, only translations of the patent claims into the other two EPO official languages would be required in order for the patent to have effect and be enforceable throughout the entire EU region. No further translations would be required and no validations in the member states would have to take place. The patent as granted in one of the official EPO languages would be the authentic text, providing legal certainty as to the scope of the claims.
To support the new EU patent system, high quality machine translation into all EU languages should ultimately be available to allow users of the patent system throughout Europe to enable users to have better and earlier access to technical information in their own native language. However, to start with, machine translations would be provided to translate the granted patent into the other two EPO official languages. A transitional regime may have to be implemented.
Furthermore, for applicants from member states whose language is not one of the EPO official languages, patent applications could still be filed in that language. Compensation would be available for costs incurred translating the application into one of the EPO official languages. This compensation would be available early on and not at the end of the patenting process.
The proposed Regulation was not met with unanimous support and has been debated within the Competitiveness Council at several meetings since July.
The EU has been wrangling with an EU-wide patent system since August 2000. However, almost all delegations expressed the need to find a solution for the translation arrangements in the short term, preferably during the Belgian presidency. Agreeing on the translation requirements is the next step in creating an EU-wide patent, which is now being treated by the Council as a matter of urgency.
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