On December 11th 2012, the European Parliament has approved regulations that as of 2014 will introduce the Community Patent. It’s an important goal that has been reached after over 40 years of discussions and postponements. As stated by Michel Barnier, European Commissioner for Internal Market and Services, this is a memorable decision that will help companies. He mentioned that
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«in 2011, in the United States 224,000 patents have been filed, in China 172,000, while in Europe only 62,000. One of the reasons is the prohibitive price and the difficulty in obtaining it at a common market level. With the new regulations, the procedures will get easier and costs will drastically go down, this is also a contribution by the Parliament and Council to the agenda towards growth.
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The set of regulations approved by the Parliament includes also the agreement on the regulations for the translations and the agreement on the introduction of european courts that efficiently control counterfeit issues and the validity of the community patents in the Union. Unfortunately, Italy and Spain are currently out of the Community Patent system since they opposed the so-called trilingualism rejecting it as unacceptable, since the usable languages were only English, French and German, which is already the case for the current european patent. We remind that the European patent is different from the future Community Patent, since it doesn’t allow for a defence of the title and once the patent has been obtained, it breaks into several national patents that can have different fates and consequences depending on the country. Everybody wishes that these two nations will soon adhere to the system, so that the companies can take advantage of a much more solid and much less espensive tool than the current one for protecting their inventions.