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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    [Lord Goodhart Contd] do not think that the European Patent Office would be under much difficulty in switching to English. Something approaching 60 per cent of all cases are handled in English today. All the European Patent Office staff are trilingual, so it was really in an effort to make the Community patents more attractive than the European patent system is today that we are suggesting the English only solution at the grant stage. 161. So if you want to include Spain in the bundle of countries to which your European patent applies, you then have to pay for translation into Spanish under the present system? (Mr Blakemore) We do today, my Lord Chairman, yes, that is correct, and we would like to change that for a Community patent. That is the prize that we are seeking. Chairman 162. Mr Nott? (Mr Nott) My Lord Chairman, if I may also comment, we do seem to have an opportunity, there does seem to be considerable support in Europe, particularly perhaps with the French and Germans, as I was saying, to go to English as a single language, and it seems to me that we ought to try to seize that opportunity if we can, because as the Community expands so the argument of going for a single language or a limited number of languages is going to become more and more difficult to maintain. 163. We were told by another witness that if you take, for example, Lord Goodhart’s example of translation into Spanish, in practice these translations serve very little purpose because even the Spaniards prefer to do it in English. How does one establish this, how do you find out whether it has served any purpose or not? (Mr Blakemore) My Lord Chairman, there are a number of studies that have been done, in particular the Dutch patent office because for all the European patent applications which designate Holland the Dutch translations are filed at the Dutch patent office and they apparently have done studies, so I am informed, to see how many times these Dutch translations are consulted. Despite the thousands which are lying there I understand that the figures are in the order of 50 per year, which I think is a pretty low usage, and that is not at all surprising because if you want information about patents in a timely fashion you would not want to wait until the grant has taken place and the translations have been filed because you would want to look at the case at the application stage when it was first published. In practice therefore nearly everyone consults patent applications in English. 164. In the language of original publication? (Mr Blakemore) Yes, that is right, my Lord Chairman, usually in English because there are firms such as Derwent that take abstracts of these and publish them all in English. It is the practice of most patent departments to purchase the Derwent publications and they are all searching them in English, so the translations are serving virtually no purpose. (Mr Nott) Also, my Lord Chairman, there is a report that has been prepared by the Economic and Social Committee of the European Parliament which suggests from their own figures that only 1 to 3 per cent of the translations are actually consulted. It is not clear whether those are translations outside the three European Patent Office languages, but I assume that that is what they mean. (Mr Sheard) My Lord Chairman, perhaps I may just pick up the point that Lord Goodhart made on the present position with the European Patent Office and the three languages. The European patent convention only requires the translation of claims. It is the national statutes that require the translation of whole specifications, so really the present position is not three full translations. Lord Hacking] My Lord Chairman, may I thank the witnesses very much, and perhaps they would excuse me if I leave now, though it is nothing to do with the quality of their evidence. Chairman] Yes, of course, Lord Hacking. Lord Goodhart 165. My Lord Chairman, perhaps I may ask another question on translation costs, and this is simply as somebody who has never seen a_ patent specification. You list figures for a 30 page specification, an 80 page specification and a 150 page specification. What is the normal figure, what is the median figure for certification? (Dr Smith) How long is a piece of string, my Lord Chairman. I think that it depends very much on the sort of technology that is being protected. Typically in a chemical or pharmaceutical invention there are a lot of embodiments of the invention, examples of possible ways in which the invention might work, which are included in the document. Many of these are very detailed technical descriptions, so as a result of that the pharmaceutical and chemical type of specifications tend to get fairly lengthy and, indeed, I think that that is the same in the area of biotechnology. (Mr Sheard) Yes, Chairman. (Dr Smith) In that area there are a lot of extra materials that need to be put in to substantiate that there is an invention. The 30 page specification I suppose is perhaps a very simple single chemical compound invention or perhaps an engineering invention, a machine, at that sort of level. Eighty pages is probably the norm for the main high technology industries, I would say, and that is why we have highlighted those in bold. it certainly is, my Lord Chairman 166. Biotechnological patents seem to have pages and pages of strings of aminoacids which presumably are the same in any language? (Mr Sheard) 1 rather hope that the translators do not charge us for those, my Lord Chairman.
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