TBIXI3

Patently Obvious
During the last few decades Europe has
been losing its competitive advantage
vis-à-vis new and emerging global
competitors. As a consequence, one of
the most sensitive and long-lasting
debates within the European political
arena has been how to enhance the
economic growth potential of
innovation. The backdrop to this
debate of course is the failure in
achieving the innovation and smart
growth objectives as identified by the
European Union in the Lisbon agenda
and, later on, reaffirmed in 2010 by the
flagship initiatives of the Europe 2020
strategy.
Whether our governments and the
European Union have proposed
sufficient measures and policies which
could have helped SMEs to further
develop and maintain their market
shares, is still an open question. It is
however incontestable that more
actions could have been undertaken to
lift administrative and economic
burdens from European SMEs, the endusers
of the incubation industry.
Following the ongoing 40-year
62 February - May 2013
Alexia Hengl examines the new EU
Unitary Patent Package and its
potential to ease the process of
cross-border IP protection
debate, on 11 December, 2012, the
European Parliament adopted the socalled
"EU unitary patent package" that
included a regulation creating a
European patent with unitary effects in
25 European Member States (the
Patent did not include Italy and Spain).
The regulation defined a new language
regime and applicable translation
arrangements for patents and an
international agreement to set up the
"Unified Patent Court".
This package was designed to fill
the innovation gap and the lack of
competitiveness for European
applicants, in comparison with their
counterparts in the U.S. or Japan, by
lowering the huge costs of granting a
patent in the EU. It is to come into
effect from 1 January, 2014 and
remedy a system that renders the US
patent market three times more
attractive than the European one.
But what will really change? Today
the inventor who wants to protect his
invention under a European patent, has
to submit his patent application at the
European Patent Office (EPO) in
Munich (or at one of its branches) in
one of the official languages of the EPO
(French, English or German),
providing a full translation of the
patent application in case it has been
filed in any other language.
The peculiarity of the current
European patent lies in the fact that it
is not a directly enforceable single
patent. On the contrary, it appears to
be a bundle of national patents, valid
only in the countries where the
patentee has decided to look for legal
protection. Indeed, following the
granting of the patent by the EPO, the
inventor must validate the patent in the
country/ies where he (or she) seeks
patent protection, by translating it and
paying national renewal fees in every
country where protection is sought. As
estimated by the European
Commission, the current cost of a
European patent in all 27 Member
States can cost roughly €36,000, of
which almost €23,000 are considered
to be translation costs alone for the
patent validation. While In the U.S.
patent system however, an average