Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2002-04-09-Speech-2-236"
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"en.20020409.10.2-236"2
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"Mr President, I too would like to thank our rapporteur, Mrs Palacio Vallelersundi, for her excellent report and, more importantly, her consistent and energetic efforts to achieve a consensus on the Community patent in the Committee on Legal Affairs and the Internal market. It is those kinds of skills that we sorely miss now that she is ex-chairman of the Committee on Legal Affairs.
Her efforts, I have to say, have sadly not been helped by the failure of the Council to achieve an outcome in this area and, indeed, an unanimous agreement. It is clear that we need a Community patent and that it is a key element in underpinning the Lisbon agenda of encouraging EU innovation and competitiveness. But the system, as Lord Inglewood has said, has to be attractive to industry and business otherwise it will simply be an irrelevance.
Industry has given the Member States, the Commission and Parliament a very clear message: it wants consistent judgments under Community jurisdiction and a common jurisprudence, in particular regarding enforcement. In particular they want a cheap and user-friendly regime. If SMEs and especially inventors are to derive any benefit from this Community patent, what they do not want is a convoluted system which will tie them up in paperwork and red tape. I illustrate this problem with the experience of one of my constituents, John Hamson, an engineer and inventor who cannot afford to employ expensive patent agents. He has a UK patent. He cites to me in letters his problems in dealing with the European Patent Office and the litany of hurdles he has to go through to obtain a European patent. I do not want to repeat them, and it is not meant as a criticism of the European Patent Office. But the fact is that he has spent a lot of money and he still has no European patent. His comments are summed up in his last letter to me some weeks ago: "the process is clearly designed to discourage small inventors and favours large business equipped with legal and patent expertise to navigate its treacherous bureaucracy."
We owe it to industry, to small and medium-sized enterprises and individual inventors to provide a simple, affordable Community patent which in turn will help EU innovation and competitiveness. We must be able to offer industry and SMEs a better deal to ensure that the protection of intellectual property is genuinely an opportunity to create and encourage innovation.
Like Lord Inglewood, I do not believe that the Council has the answers to these problems. It will fall to Commissioner Bolkestein to try to find the solution. However, we have had a rapporteur who has made a Herculean effort to try to achieve this. It is no fault of hers that we have not got the right consensus, but I have to say that there is no compromise to be achieved on languages. Therefore I leave it to Commissioner Bolkestein to try to find a solution that will satisfy some of my constituents back in the north-west of England."@en1
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