Shelving of EU patent court draws ire
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(InfoWorld) - Political naivety and national protectionism were blamed for quashing the latest attempt to forge a single patent regime for the European Union, according to members of Europe's business community.On Monday, national governments shelved a compromise solution tabled by the European Commission that would have allowed the creation of a single patent court. The decision sparked an angry response from the European Commission, the Union's executive body, as well as from trade groups including UNICE, which represents Europe's biggest firms."It is unacceptable for the E.U. to be lagging behind its competitors in the patents field," said Jerome Chauvin, UNICE's head of legal affairs in a telephone interview. "It's frustrating to see the member states of the E.U. putting the same excuses on the table each time."There have been numerous attempts to break the political deadlock in the debate on Europe's patent regime over the past 30 years. This time around the frustration is deeper because innovation and competitiveness are now supposed to be top political priorities, and no one disagrees that fixing the patent system is essential for improving Europe's ability to compete.As Europe continues to squabble over what languages a single European patent should be translated into, and whether or not a pan-European patent court would be better or worse than the 25 national patent courts in the member states, China is plowing massive investment into research and development and will this year outspend Japan, the world's second biggest investor in R&D, according to a report released this week by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD)."In Europe politics is at odds with economic reality," said Francisco Mingorance, a European affairs expert with the trade group, the Business Software Alliance."All the indicators show that the E.U. could be made a better place if it solved the problem with its patent regime. The problem is that the message doesn't appear to register with entrenched politicians," he added.France and Spain were the main opponents of the Commission's plan to make the Union a signatory to the European Patent Litigation Agreement (EPLA), a plan by the European Patent Office (EPO) to create one patent court to handle all patent litigation in the 31 member countries of the EPO.The French government opposes the move because the EPLA would be outside of E.U. jurisdiction and would therefore pose constitutional problems. It wants the E.U. to stick to its more ambitious, and difficult, aim of creating a single patent for all countries in the E.U..In September it came up with an alternative to the EPLA plan that involved creating a single patent court under E.U. law, thus avoiding signing up to a non-E.U. agreement.Other countries including Spain supported the French objection for differing reasons, including claims that the existing, fragmented system is cheaper for their local companies that mostly operate inside their home country.Finland, currently holder of the six-month rotating presidency of the E.U., has been criticized for pushing for an agreement before preparing member states. "This time 'round the mess was made by the Finnish presidency," Mingorance said.In their eagerness to claim credit for pushing the patents debate forward, the Finnish government "caught the Commission off guard and it failed to prepare other countries for the debate. They seem to have upset everybody," he added.Consequently on Monday, each national government turned up at the meeting in Brussels with their original fixed positions regarding patents still in place. "The Finns didn't expect France and Spain to object. You could call it political naivety," Mingorance said.Charlie McCreevy, the commissioner who has spent most of this year trying to break the patent deadlock, described the decision taken on Monday by government ministers as a setback, and France's alternative solution to patent litigation as ill-timed."The French proposal came in September. I'm not knocking new ideas and this one's interesting, but it's a pity I didn't hear about it before I started the consultation," he said in an interview Thursday at an intellectual property conference.A year ago McCreevy said he would make one final effort to solve the problem of the E.U.'s fragmented patent regime, launching a consultation with industry, academia and the legal profession. The consultation ended in July with a hearing in Brussels at which the idea of signing up to the EPLA agreement was debated thoroughly.The commissioner said that after the meeting of national government ministers on Monday he is "pessimistic" of making any meaningful progress in reforming the E.U.'s patent regime."I'm pessimistic because this EPLA idea was a genuine piece of lateral thinking to move the situation forward. I won't continue beating my head against a stone wall because it's not good for my head," he said.During his speech to roughly 500 lawyers and businessmen and women, he urged companies to lobby their national governments, to try to persuade them to compromise their long-standing entrenched positions regarding patents in Europe.He held out a small hope of moving forward in the first half of next year, when Germany takes over leadership of the E.U. "We'll revisit this under the German presidency and give people time to think," he said.
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A ruling against the European Commission in the Microsoft antitrust case could affect its ability to regulate competition.
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WIPO 'not flexible enough' The European Commission wants to create a new layer of intellectual property protections because it says existing structures such as WIPO are not flexible enough.â¦
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The hit on Qualcomm from a patent suit it lost to rival Broadcom may be slashed because of an unrelated ruling that came down in August.
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Represantatives from Texas Instruments and AmberWave Systems say proposed legislation goes too far in overhauling the patent system.
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(InfoWorld) - In the wake of a recent landmark Supreme Court ruling, patent reform is bubbling toward a boil on Capitol Hill, where advocates in both parties and both chambers are urging timely action on pending legislation and contending with well-financed interest groups on both sides of the issue. "This is a big fight about winners and losers," said Sen. Tom Coburn, R-Okla., adding that he is not entirely satisfied with the pending Patent Reform Act of 2007, which was introduced in the Senate in April. "The question is how do we strike the balance." The Patent Reform Act legislation would make the requirements for obtaining a new patent more stringent, make it easier for rivals to challenge patents, and reduce the penalties for patent violations. Committee chairman Patrick Leahy of Vermont said that he, Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, and a number of other colleagues have been working on the nonpartisan bill for several years and that the existing patent system was designed for a bygone era. A decision by the Supreme Court in April in the case of KSR International vs. Teleflex marked a major clarification of the court's thinking about the granting of patents for new inventions and set a higher bar for what qualifies as an original invention. The ruling has already prompted legal wrangling between VoIP vendor Vonage in its ongoing dispute with Verizon over Internet telephony patents, and legal experts say that the ruling was a direct rebuke to lower courts that have tended to favor patent owners over those challenging the legality of patents that have been issued. Despite strong support from Democratic and Republican leaders in both chambers for change in the patent system, however, passage of the bill into law is not assured.Â  IT behemoths, including Cisco, Apple, Dell, HP, Microsoft, and Oracle, have aligned as the Coalition for Patent Fairness to press for the sweeping changes envisioned in the bill. They maintain that reforms are necessary to reduce costly, sometimes frivolous litigation. However, other technology companies, including InterDigital Communications and Qualcomm, have banded together as the Innovation Alliance and joined the biotechnology and manufacturing sectors to limit changes to the system. They argue that the bill would give patent infringers an advantage. The high stakes involved in the patent issue were illustrated June 6 at a hearing of the Senate Committee on the Judiciary, which was briefly delayed as committee aides tried to locate an extra room for the overflowing crowd. "What we're trying to do here is move the process forward," Sen. Orrin Hatch said in an appeal to lobbyists for compromise once the hearing got started. "There are a number of organizations who could stop this bill." The bill's two main sticking points are a provision that would give the public a new opportunity to review patents after they've been granted, and a provision granting the right for an immediate appeal to the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit after a district court has made a pre-trial ruling on the framework that will be used to determine infringement (known as a "claim construction"). Large IT companies and the financial industry support the "post-grant review" of patents, which would allow for a reevaluation of suspect patent claims before companies are forced to go through lengthy, costly litigation, John Squires, chief intellectual property counsel at Goldman, Sachs & Co., told the committee. Opponents countered that the proposed post-grant review process would create an essentially limitless opportunity for rivals to challenge patents. "If a patent can be easily challenged at any time under a low standard of proof, (then) patents will have much less value, and investment predicated upon them will inevitably be diminished," Kathryn Biberstein, senior vice president of Alkermes, a biotechnology company, told the committee in her testimony. "This, in turn, will likely result in fewer cures for diseases and other breakthrough biotechnology products." The biotech industry and the Innovation Alliance also oppose the right for an immediate appeal after a claim construction ruling, arguing that it would encourage appeals, further prolonging cases. But advocates, including Palm senior vice president Mary Doyle, said it would reduce the chance of conducting unnecessary trials and cut down litigation costs. The witnesses were eager to raise two other controversial provisions in the legislation, regarding how damages in patent cases are determined and the expansion of the Patent and Trademark Office's authority to make rules. Doyle and Squires, supporting the bill's "mandatory apportionment" of damages provision, told the committee that damages today can be unreasonably high because the calculation is based on the value of an entire product, not just the patented feature at issue. Countering that argument, Biberstein and Bruce Bernstein, chief intellectual property and licensing officer at InterDigital, said that the provision would replace today's market-oriented valuation of inventions with subjective jury findings. Debate on expanding the PTO's rulemaking authority mirrored the rest of the patent debate with representatives from the financial sector and the Coalition for Patent Reform joining forces in support, while witnesses from the biotechnology sector and the Innovation Alliance cautioned against the change. An identical House version of the Patent Reform Act is pending, having recently won approval by the House Judiciary Subcommittee on Intellectual Property. Leahy said he is eager to prepare the legislation for a vote by the Senate Judiciary Committee, but he did not indicate when that vote might occur.ADVERTISEMENTIBM Information On Demand 2006Industrial Industry Leaders, please join us at IBM's premier information management global event, IBM Information On Demand 2006, October 15-20, Anaheim, CA. More IBM business and technical solutions content in one place than ever before! Select from  over 800 sessions. Register today!
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Experts said a European antitrust ruling might signal problems for companies like Apple, Intel and Qualcomm.
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(InfoWorld) - European Commissioner Charlie McCreevy set out his plan for a single approach to patents across the European Union on Thursday, ahead of an Oct. 12 vote on the matter in the European Parliament, winning plaudits from some erstwhile opponents. Previous attempts to introduce European legislation on patents, or to extend existing legislation to encompass software, haveÂ met stiff opposition. McCreevy spelled out his two-track approach in a speech to the Parliament in Strasbourg, France, on Thursday. His ultimate goal is a single patent system across the E.U., but he is also pushing for improvements to the existing patent regime, governed by the European Patent Office (EPO) in Munich. The EPO sees two problems with the existing regime: the lack of a single jurisdiction for patents in Europe, and the prohibitive costs involved in translating the patents into all European languages. Its answer to the jurisdiction question is the European Patent Litigation Agreement (EPLA), which many opponents of patents for software-related inventions abhor. The EPLA would create one patent court for patent disputes in all countries that are members of the EPO, which include all 25 E.U. member states except Malta. In his speech on Thursday, McCreevy appeared to take some of the EPLA opponents' concerns to heart. "I recognize there are legitimate doubts and concerns" about the EPLA, he told members of the Parliament. Florian Mueller, coordinator of a lobby group opposed to software patents, welcomed the Commissioner's approach. Mueller's group helpedÂ defeat a proposed European directiveÂ last year that could have enabled patenting of software. "During that long debate about the software patent directive, our concerns were always ridiculed by the Commission, making us out to be paranoid. Times seem to have changed," he said in a blog posting Friday. "McCreevy conceded that the proposed European Patent Litigation Agreement leaves a lot to be desired in its present form," he added. Mueller, along with many other critics of Europe's patent regime from the open-source and free software communities, and members of the European Parliament from four mainstream political parties, believe that the plans for an EPLA will simply duplicate the approach to patenting championed by the EPO. This regime has granted numerous software-related patents and is considered to be much more lax in the way it hands out patent monopolies than the national patent offices in individual European countries. Opponents of the EPO object to the fact that the EPO would select judges from within its own ranks to preside over disputes, as they believe this will spread what they call the lax attitude to software patents to all EPO countries. At a hearing in July hosted by the European Commission, EPO president Alain Pompidou called for the swift ratification of the EPLA, which remains a draft agreement. "The draft European Patent Litigation Agreement must be submitted to an intergovernmental conference as soon as possible," Pompidou said then. While McCreevy appeared to favor taking divergent views into account, he did stress the need for the EPLA in his speech. Mueller took issue with that in his blog, pointing out that patent disputes rarely involve more than one country at a time. National patent courts are, therefore, sufficient to deal with the vast bulk of cases, he said. "I don't mean to say that it's a perfect state of affairs if a company may have to enforce one and the same patent in more than one country at a time. But the current practice of sue-in-one-settle-in-all works quite well. About two-thirds of all E.U. patent infringement litigation takes place in Germany [about 900 cases per year], and in many of those cases the parties settle the dispute for the remaining European countries after a ruling or settlement in the first country in which they fight it out in court. That's pragmatic," he said. The European Parliament will vote on whether to support McCreevy's approach to patents on Oct. 12.
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Microsoft's defeat in a European appeals courtÂ Monday has left open-source developers hopeful about the future although still dissatisfied with the company's compliance with a 3-year-old antitrust ruling.
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Patent infringement decision leads to one of the largest patent decisions in history.
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&quot;The Software Patent Directive has been withdrawn from the Agenda of the Agricultural Council. Poland&#39;s Minister of Information Society and Technology, Wlodzimierz Marcinski, made a powerful statement at the
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Legal fees loom as ImClone loses a patent dispute.
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The European Union has again failed to ratify the software patent directive, after a crucial last-minute intervention from Poland.
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Brussels braces for the next battle Intellectual property lobbyists are warning that new plans to shake up Europe's policy on patents could put patentable software back on the menu, as well as upping legal fees and putting small businesses in jeopardy.â¦
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A European court dismisses Microsoft's appeal in a long-running dispute about competition.
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Don't count your chickens... A landmark court ruling which last year backed the European Commission's last competition action against Microsoft may not be as helpful in its current action as has been widely thought, according to a competition lawyer.â¦
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Bickering over details to blame The EU Internal Markets Commissioner has warned that Europe is about to miss out on a chance to forge a pan-European patent disputes forum because of long-standing international bickering on what a system might look like.â¦