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.

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    4 March 1998] [Continued 6.3 A Community patent system should be administered by a dedicated and specialist court system. There should be a specialist expert Community patent court operating as a Court of First Instance which could be centralised but preferably should be peripatetic so that it could sit in the country of the applicant to the proceedings. 6.4 The specialist court would set its own rules of procedure, with power to order preliminary injunctions, to deal at first instance with infringement and revocation cases. We would suggest this court could also have appellate jurisdiction before a different panel of judges, with appeals on points of law only to the European Court of Justice. Q7. Should the Luxembourg Convention be turned into a legal instrument covered by the EC treaty (i.e., a regulation made under Article 235)? Tier wes: Q8. What are the implications for the development of patent laws and policy at the national and wider international level? Is further harmonisation desirable, necessary, inevitable? 8.1 Further harmonisation is desirable, and necessary on the right terms, but not inevitable. Q9. What should be the relationship between any Community instrument and the European Patent Convention? 9.1 It is necessary to establish links between the two systems and it should be possible to convert a Community patent application into a European patent application at any time up to the point of grant. Conversion in the other direction should also be provided for, so far as appropriate, but should not allow any increase in the scope of protection in any individual state. 9.2 There would be advantages in bringing the European Patent Office into the Community framework, but we would want to maintain the existing European patent system. However, it is important that the European Patent Office should, as soon as possible, become fully in control of its own finances and be able to set renewal fees on European patents, rather than being dependent on a proportion of the national renewal fees. October 1997 Memorandum by Trade Marks Patents and Designs Federation (TMPDF) Q1. What is the value of patents to United Kingdom Industry? We believe this question is best answered by an historical analysis. The UK patent system is rooted in the Statute of Monopolies of 1624, which sanctioned the grant of a monopoly for any “manner of new manufactures”. The aim of this form of words was to offer exclusive rights which would encourage new industrial activity and thus enhance the potential for increased tax revenues whilst preventing reestablishment of the monopolies which had been prevalent during the Tudor period. The Statute also drew on experience in other countries, for example Venice in the previous century, where similar measures were introduced to encourage new industrial enterprise. To the modern ear the phrase “manner of new manufactures” is somewhat confusing. The confusion arises because the Statute was initially aimed not so much at encouraging product innovation as it is understood in the modern sense but at codifying a long established policy of encouraging the introduction of new industries per se. Thus, glass blowers, weavers and white paper makers, amongst others, set up manufacturing facilities in the UK and trained domestic craftsmen as a result of such encouragement. The UK economy was largely agrarian in this period, and the promotion of product innovation would have been of little significance in the absence of the industrial infrastructure, which the Statute aimed to generate. However, the need for the introduction of foreign industrial techniques lessened as UK industrial activity broadened and matured and the system then became progressively focused on new product development within the now established domestic industries. The 1624 Statute was as a result progressively interpreted so as to extend to the protection of product and process innovations, and in due course this because its sole function. In this connection, it is instructive to review the Alphabetical List of Patentees and Inventors for 1617 to 1852 published by the Patent Office, which demonstrates the breadth of industrial development during this period. This illustrates that although such activity reached its peak during the Industrial Revolution, it was as a culmination of two centuries of technical development driven largely by the climate created by the patent system. At the time of the Industrial Revolution a number of factors, including steam power, realisation of the potential of coal and the development of steel, opened the floodgates of innovation by facilitating the evolution of the old craft industries into modern industrial enterprises. Names such as James Watt, Matthew Boulton, Richard Arkwright and Henry Fourdrinier, for example, all appear in the List as patentees whose inventions founded
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