Latest Positions from Patent Judges' Symposium, EPO, EU Authorities, and AIPPI on Language Regime and Legal Compatibility of EEUPC

Sponsored by the European Patent Office, a pan-European group of patent judges and selected political guests meets biannually for discussing political an legal patent issues on a European scale. Now the 15th Symposium of European Patent Judges was held from 15 to 17 September 2010 in Lisbon (see list of participants). The European Patent Judges' Symposium appears to be a rather exclusive corporation since, besides an official press release on the EPO website and today's posting on the usually very well informed ipeg blog, no substantive information on the meeting seems to be available throughout the whole internet. Patent judges do not appear to blog or tweet from their events. At least, the EPO announced that proceedings of the Symposium will be published as a special edition of the Official Journal in early 2011. According to what is available, the main issue of the meeting was the proposal of the EU Council for a European Patent and European Patent Court. Further sessions related to the draft rules of procedure for a future European patent court (which may also include the judges' position on the controversally discussed regulation of representation before the new court), the exclusion of patent protection for surgical, diagnostic and therapeutical methods, and the protection of computer-implemented inventions in the US and under the EPC. The EU Council's Draft Agreement on a European Patent and European and EU Patent Court (EEUPC) of 23 March 2009 (Doc 9076/09) has, due to a request for an opinion, recently being assessed by the Advocates General (AG) of the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU). The Advocates General concluded in their statement of position that the draft agreement in its current form is incompatible with EU treaties, especially regarding the judical control of the future EEUPC and the proposed language regime for the EU patent. The patent judges, however, were not overly concerned about this criticism and emphasised that the Advocates General also offered solutions for the incompatibilities. While the CJEU is not bound by the AG's statement, the final opinion by the CJEU, however, will be decisive for the project in the current form. From a political point of view, Benoît Battistelli, President of the EPO, and Margot Fröhlinger, Director of Knowledge-Based Economy inside the DG Internal Market of the European Commission, commented on the current shape of the EEUPC project. While Ms. Fröhlinger repeated the Commission's economical position that implementing the EEUPC system would particularly help European SMEs, Mr. Battistelli emphasised that, not very surprisingly, "the EPO fully supports [...] a EU patent to be granted by the EPO" and praised the EPO's machine translation project as a "valuable contribution to solving the language issue [...] blocking progress on the EU patent for more than 30 years". As to the crucial language issue, the European Commission published a proposal for a Council Regulation on the tr…