The Community patent and the patent system in Europe, with evidence / House of Lords, Select committee on the European Communities.

  • Great Britain. Parliment. House of Lords. Select Committee on the European Communities.
Date:
1998
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Licence: Open Government Licence

Credit: The Community patent and the patent system in Europe, with evidence / House of Lords, Select committee on the European Communities. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    52/144 (page 20)
    18 February 1998] [Continued and were examined. Chairman 67. Mr Connor, Mr Cannon, Mr Lees and Mr Gold, thank you very much for coming this afternoon. Thank you also very much for your respective written contributions which the sub-Committee have found extremely useful. I wonder whether we could start simply by asking you, for the purposes of the record, to identify yourselves and your Association. (Mr Connor) I am the Past President of the Licensing Executives Society for Britain and Ireland. I am on a number of committees of the International Licensing Executives Society. I am currently a consultant, although for 20 years up until 1990, I was General Manager firstly of the Post Office and then British Telecom, responsible for all their intellectual property dealings. (Mr Cannon) I am a patent agent, a European patent attorney and a solicitor. Apart from two years in which I worked for City solicitors, I have spent the past 40 years or so working in private practice in a patent agents firm. In my early days I was involved quite a bit in licensing matters—much less so recently—but I have retained an interest in them and remain a member of the LES. 68. You are representing LES? (Mr Cannon) I am indeed, yes. (Mr Lees) Iam a Past President of the Chartered Institute of Patent Agents. I have spent 42 years in private practice in Yorkshire. I have been retired from practice for four years but have been very active in the affairs of the Chartered Institute during that time. (Mr Gold) Iam the current Vice President of the Chartered Institute of Patent Agents. I am a European patent agent and also a solicitor. After qualification as a patent agent I started my own patent agency which I continued until 1991 when I joined a City law firm where I am currently a partner. I have both small SME clients as well as multi-nationals, but I am representing the Chartered Institute. 69. Thank you very much. Now, can we start by asking you to tell us in what respect a Community patent would, if I can use patent jargon, satisfy a long-felt want. (Mr Gold) Perhaps I could kick off that ball, my Lord Chairman. I think that one of the immense appeals of a unitary patent system is its great superficial simplicity. Instead of a multiplicity of patents to watch over and administer, you have one single patent covering a very large market of 300 million-plus people, and serving a market which is increasingly integrated. So the world of patents, with all its myriad rules and regulations and national quirks would, it seems—and this is the will-o’-the-wisp—be eliminated and we would enter the sunny upland of simplicity and lack of complexity. 70. So in principle it is highly desirable. The question is on what terms is it to be had? (Mr Gold) That is so. 71. If we can go back to the 1975 (as amended in 1989) Luxembourg Convention, your organisation does not think very much of it. Can you slightly enlarge on why this is so. I think we more-or-less understand but if you could just tell us. (Mr Gold) Of course there are plenty of positive features in it but we are particularly critical about two aspects. One is the costs implications of a regime which still requires translations of lengthy technical documents, that we call patent specifications, into the languages of the Member States. Of course, here I must immediately put down a marker of the future enlargement of the European Union. Unfortunately, all the new members knocking on the door have their own language, so we cannot even have the kind of savings of using French in both Belgium, say, and France. Also, the very high cost which we guess will be the cost of maintaining in force a Community patent throughout its lifetime. Above all, we feel that the present arrangements for enforcement and litigation of Community patents carry a lot of uncertainty, mainly through lack of harmonisation of enforcement procedures in the national courts, which will initially be under the hat of Community Courts of First Instance, and will be empowered to deal with the whole Community with the issues of validity and infringement. We do not want to be nationalistic about it, but we do not feel that throughout the European Union expertise among the judiciary—and, indeed, amongst the legal profession—is, shall we say, uniformly distributed. There are certain countries where we would say that competence is high; others it is best to say we are not so sure what level of competence there exists. So we feel that these are the two main drawbacks of the present arrangement: cost and legal uncertainties. 72. It has been put to us—if I can go to the legal answer and come back to translations—that having national courts dealing with these matters, plus the provisions of the Brussels Convention under which the court who first gets hold of the case has to be accorded jurisdiction and other courts have to wait until it is finished, is a recipe for forum shopping and disaster, whether you are a patentee or whether you are an infringer. Depending upon whether you want the proceedings to go extremely fast or extremely slow, you will choose your forum accordingly. Is that a real danger? (Mr Gold) 1 believe it is. Again, without in any way saying anything detrimental or nasty about the quality of the judgments in certain European Member States, it is undoubtedly a fact that procedures in some countries—and may I just mention one, Italy—tend to be very slow. I have seen written proposals by professors of law in Italy quite seriously putting forward the idea of the so-called Italian torpedo, under