New Hopes for Patent Translators - Industry opposes EU patent plans

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Under current legislation, patent owners who want to protect their inventions EU-wide have to file an application with the EU patent office in Munich and are required to provide translations of their claims and descriptions into all official languages of the EU. On the one hand, with currently 21 offical languages within the EU, this not only means high translation costs but also a heavy administrative burden for the applying parties. On the other, these requirements have helped creating a strong translation industry across Europe, concentrating heavily on patent translations.

For decades now, EU officials have pushed for a common EU-Patent legislation, which would reduce the costs of ownership tremendously, speed up the patenting process and therefore would make the EU more competitive for the future. Early this year the EU opened new consultation rounds for a final attempt to realize these ambitious plans.

As the New York Times now reports the industry, however, does not support the so-called community patent. "But far from receiving support from industry, which has the most to gain from the community patent, three of the most influential industry lobby groups have advised the commission to drop the initiative for now and instead improve the existing patent regime run by the European Patent Office in Munich," Paul Meller writes in Saturdays NYT edition.

After the debacle over the software patenting, when European politicians backed by software industry giants tried to pass a law on the ability to patent software-related inventions but lost the battle due to a strong opposition across Europe, the industry now fears the opening of the Pandorra's box.

Original plans for the EU community patent suggested that application would need to be translated into one of the major languages English, German or French. This would have excused countries with English, German or French as their official language from having to translate patents at all. Other countries would have to issue their patents in the local language, and either English, French or German.

Patent protection in all 25 countries in the Union currently costs around 60,000 euros, the NYT reports. A common patenting legislation or regulation would have reduced the cost by nearly two thirds - but would also have weakend the turnover of many of the smaller LSPs engaged in patent translations.

Luckily for the translation industry in Europe, the plans for the community patent are opposed by the major industry interest groups.

"No community patent would be better than a bad community patent," Ilias Konteas, an adviser on intellectual property matters at UNICE, the federation of European employers, is cited by NYT. The Business Software Alliance, an industry group that represents some of the largest technology companies in the world, including Microsoft, as well as the International Chamber of Commerce, a group of large companies, have urged the commission to back off from the patent project, the article informs.

Read the article: New York Times