Skip to content. | Skip to navigation

Personal tools
Sections
You are here: Home Breaking news Historic EU summit patent deal now thrown into question

Historic EU summit patent deal now thrown into question

03 July 2012, 13:57 CET
— filed under: , ,
Historic EU summit patent deal now thrown into question

Photo © Alexander Raths - Fotolia

(STRASBOURG) - A days-old EU summit breakthrough to create a single European patent after decades of dispute was thrown into question Tuesday by the European parliament and the European Commission.

A deal making it easier and cheaper for researchers to protect inventions was reached last week with Paris awarded a Unified Patent Court to be and London and Munich sharing out key offices.

But the June 28-29 summit compromise between the three "unfortunately comes at the price of the deletion of important community elements of the original Commission proposal," said the president of the EU executive, Jose Manuel Barroso.

"The Commission has therefore reserved its position and I have made this reserve very clear to heads of state and government," Barroso told the parliament, which in anger has postponed indefinitely a vote on the patent that was originally scheduled for Wednesday.

"The situation will now require an assessment between the three institutions," Barroso said, referring to the Commission, the parliament, and Council grouping the governments of the 27 European Union states.

Last week's deal had been hailed as a "historical breakthrough" which, said British Prime Minister David Cameron, "has been I think more than 23 years in the making."

MEPs on Monday refused to back the compromise on the grounds that EU heads of state and government had watered down the patent's founding legislation, removing the power of the European Court of Justice to arbitrate in case of a dispute in a sop to London.

Under the compromise, London was to handle cases in the fields of life sciences, chemistry and human necessities such as agriculture while Munich housed administrative offices as well as handling advanced engineering and resources efficiency.

Paris had textiles and electricity, giving each city around one-third of patent cases.

 


Document Actions