The Parliamentary History of the European “Unitary Patent”

Ingve Stjerna (Rechtsanwalt, Düsseldorf), The Parliamentary History of the European “Unitary Patent”, Verbatim protocol of the public meetings in the European Parliament and its Legal Affairs Committee.

"For the European industry, the „unitary patent package“, consisting of the two Regulations on the unitary patent and the respective language regime as well as the intergovernmental Agreement on the creation of the Unified Patent Court, belong to the most important legislative projects of the last decades.

However, this importance is grossly contradicted by the merely insufficient possibilities of the public and the professional circles to get an insight into the respective legislative proceedings and to obtain information about its progress and the aspects discussed. In legislative proceedings at European level, verbatim protocols are published for Plenary meetings only and not for meetings of the Parliamentary Committees, although a major part of Parliamentary work is done in the latter. Without a broad knowledge of foreign languages, also the recordings available on the Parliament TV or the Parliament’s media archive, if they exist, only allow for an incomplete insight already due to the number of different languages in which the speeches are given, the European Union currently has 24 official languages. The available simultaneous translations can only compensate for this insufficiently, as they do not constitute an authentic reproduction of the statements.

The present document intends to allow interested persons to obtain information about the course of the Parliamentary negotiations on the “unitary patent package” at least from an ex post perspective. It reproduces the wording of the statements made in the respective public meetings of the European Parliament and its Legal Affairs Committee between 2 December 2010, after the political “breakthrough” for the creation of a Community patent was achieved, and 11 December 2012, on which the European Parliament adopted the components of the “patent package”. The document permits a detailed insight into the different stages and developments of the legislative proceedings, for instance the handling of the European Court of Justice’s opinion 1/09 on the originally planned structure of the Patent Court system, the discussions about using the procedure of enhanced cooperation after the necessary unanimity on the language regime was missed or the origins of the controversies about the...