European SMEs are powerhouses of innovation. Who else can better and faster transform the clients’ needs and requests into new products, applications and services, and market them? They also bear the burden of testing new products on the market, with high risk to fail investments if a new product doesn’t deliver or is not liked.
And then comes a competitor, maybe from another country in Europe, maybe from another continent, and claims that this or that idea was first her or his idea.
It is common ground that we need to better protect our intellectual property throughout Europe. The European Commission has delivered in the field of trademarks and designs with the European Intellectual Property Office EUIPO in Alicante. To register an EU-wide trademark costs only 850€, you can do it alone online and as an SME you also get a high quality support from the SME Mediation Center in case of litigation. Currently you can even apply for financial aid to register your design with the SME Fund.
But for what regards industrial patents, the situation is dramatically different. First, a European Patent can cost 15.000€ or more for a comprehensive EU-wide patent (source). This is due to the fact that you have to first apply to the EPO in Munich, where you pay roughly about 6.100€ (source), and then you have to ask for validation at the member state levels, which adds up other costs. If you then need help from a lawyer, the 15.000€ are easily reached. And why is this so expensive? Because it is a semi-public self-financed institution, set up as an “enhanced cooperation” among some, but not all member states, while EUIPO is an EU-Agency which is subventioned by the public.
Easy to understand why European SMEs don’t register their patents. And things are getting even worse: 26 out of 27 member states want to set up a Unified Patent Court, as another self-financed semi-public institution, where court fees are calculated to cover the costs of the judges and the administration. That means to open a court case to defend your patent in whole Europe against other competitors costs between 11.000€ and 20.000€. And if this article of the Foundation for Free Information Infrastructure FFII is correct, the European Commission did at least not undertake what’s necessary, i.e. to do a thorough and adequate Impact Assessment on this, and some member states like Germany don’t even care. For them the cost of opening a court case at the future UPC (which still has to be ratified by some member states) is justified, although on national levels you would pay between 165€ and +/- 1.000€, and if necessary you would also get financial aid from the State to do so.
All this is strongly disincentivising the progress of patent protection in Europe, especially for millions of SMEs, with the tangible intellectual property already developed, often even implemented and sold. That’s why we support the call of FFII for a new and honest Impact Assessment on the UPC as soon as possible.
The best solution would be to make EPO be a decentralised EU-agency like EUIPO, and link Patent Protection litigation to either national courts and as final instance to the EU Court of Justice. This is what European SMEs need.
#SOSPatentAbuse: if your company is by any chance a victim of unjustified patent litigation by hands of socalled patent trolls, please tell us your story here. We want to bring to the European Commission and the member states the necessary data and stories on how some law firms act against the interests of many SMEs in Europe, abusing of badly defined patent laws.
