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
Catalogue details

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.

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    a2 18 February 1998] [Continued [Chairman Contd] factor. If they require countries like Austria and Sweden, where the charges are very high, that is hard lines. They prefer to take the countries where for one translation into French, for example, you can have three or four countries. 79. When you say “Austria and Sweden, where the costs are very high”, you mean the translation costs? (Mr Lees) The translation cost and the cost of publication. (Mr Gold) In fact, in Austria the official fees are very high per page cost of the specification, so even if I get my German attorney to make the translation and sent the German text to Austria, the Austrian national costs would be the same as the German costs, including the translation. 80. This is just a local restrictive practice? (Mr Gold) Yes, it is a local restrictive practice, no doubt protecting the local patent office as well as the local professions from the threatened loss of business to other national patent offices. Certainly I support the idea that in certain countries, certainly in Austria, the costs of validating an accepted European patent in that country are quite exorbitant; so one’s clients can enjoy the selectivity that the EPC now offers them by making choices on application as to which countries they designate. They get a second bite at the cherry on entry into the national procedure. Later on, of course, they get a third bite of the cherry by selectively paying renewals in countries. For SMEs this is a wonderful thing. Therefore, from their point of view, the cost of a Community patent needs to be such that it ought not to cost more than, I suppose, either a United States patent; or, if that is crying for the moon, not more than five national patents in Europe at the moment, or thereabouts. 81. That is where the balance comes, does it? (Mr Gold) Yes. (Mr Connor) May I add something. Without translation I think half of the bargain of getting a patent is the disclosure. If the disclosure is in a language which is not available to technologists throughout the Union, then part of that bargain may well have been lost. 82. Why can they not all read English? (Mr Connor) My point entirely. A common language would help us all. (Mr Gold) May I come back on that. This is a very pertinent point,my Lord Chairman. There is a lot of pressure from European industry of the non-English kind as well eventually to standardise on English. Really the point is put in a slightly different way. The fact of the matter is that these translations are simply not used. Even in the country set to have the highest usage, which is Spain, the rate of usage is, as I understand it, 4 per cent. As one Frenchman said very eloquently at the Commission hearing in Luxembourg, “If I went to my boss and said, ‘I want to spend £100 but only £4 will be useful,’ I know exactly what he would say (the effect of whatever it is in French) ‘Pick up your P45 on your way out.’” That is the sad part of the translation. One understands the cultural and the victim of innocent infringement without having understood the document, etcetera, etcetera: but the realities of the matter are that (a) translations are not used; and (b) that any sensible businessman would consider in, say, Spain, talking to a patent attorney first to ask him to do an infringement search. A patent attorney should speak English, French, German, to do the work for him. 83. What is your assessment of the practicalities of getting such a deal? (Mr Gold) The pressure from the major users at Luxembourg was there for everybody to hear. It was remarkable that the European industrial groupings, with German and French spokespersons, were saying, “We are not talking about the language of Moliére or Goethe or Shakespeare.” We are talking about technical and legal jargon, (if my colleagues will forgive me), and this is not a cultural issue, this is a technological, research and development issue, and de facto English is the language. Lord Borrie 84. It is easy in this room, because we all speak English, to veer towards saying English should be the one language, and there would be tremendous advantages clearly from what you said for that. I wonder if you could indicate any relativities if one went down the road of instead of there being just English, being the three languages that you have just mentioned or, alternatively, two. I can see the cost would be that much more, but I wonder whether you could indicate how much more and then one might be in a better place to discuss. (Mr Gold) We, as the Chartered Institute, of course, serve multi-national clients as well as domestic clients. I suppose a quarter of all European patents are taken up by Americans and another quarter by Japanese. Although they often select German representatives, the working language is almost invariably English. So even before the United Kingdom contribution, which is about 9 or 10 per cent of applications, we are already talking about the majority of European applications being conducted for people who are effectively English speaking. The cost: all I can say to you is that in my experience, in my practice, if I can get my translations done by the local patent attorney—who no doubt makes a profit on this because this is what he is in business for—we get charged roughly within a range of £150 to £200 per thousand words. An average mechanical specification, mechanical subject matter, would probably be 3,000 words. Chemical and bio-technology specifications tend to be a bit longer because the law does require a number of examples to be given and 5,000 words would be probably a minimum. I am sure my Lord Chairman will have seen even longer ones. So we are talking about pretty substantial sums. If our Spanish friends would be content, say, with French and English, I am sure the Chartered Institute would be happy to go along with that; but these people tended to say at this hearing that certainly in southern Europe