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| Authored by: Ian Al on Sunday, May 13 2012 @ 04:27 AM EDT |
I don't know what it is, but it has no legal force in the EU and the courts only
accept patents awarded within the country jurisdiction.
Here's some
quotes from their website.The European Patent Office (EPO) offers
inventors a uniform application procedure which enables them to seek patent
protection in up to 40 European countries. Supervised by the Administrative
Council, the Office is the executive arm of the European Patent
Organisation.
International relations
The Office works in
close co-operation with the patent offices of the member states and other
countries around the world
History
Over 20 states met at a
diplomatic conference in Munich in 1973 to discuss the introduction of a
European patent grant procedure.
From Wikipedia:1970s
and 1980s: proposed Community Patent Convention
Work on a Community
patent started in the 1970s, but the resulting Community Patent Convention (CPC)
was a failure.
The "Luxembourg Conference on the Community Patent" took
place indeed in 1975 and the Convention for the European Patent for the common
market, or (Luxembourg) Community Patent Convention (CPC), was signed at
Luxembourg on December 15, 1975, by the 9 member states of the European Economic
Community at that time. However the CPC never entered into force. It was not
ratified by enough countries.
Fourteen years later, the Agreement
relating to Community patents was made at Luxembourg on December 15, 1989. It
attempted to revive the CPC project, but also failed. This Agreement consisted
of an amended version of the original Community Patent Convention. Twelve states
signed the Agreement: Belgium, Denmark, France, Germany, Greece, Ireland, Italy,
Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Portugal, Spain, and United Kingdom. All of those
states would need to have ratified the Agreement to cause it to enter into
force,[5] but only seven did so: Denmark, France, Germany, Greece, Luxembourg,
the Netherlands, and United Kingdom.[6]
Nevertheless, as a minor
consolation, a majority of member states of the EEC at that time introduced some
harmonisation into their national patent laws in anticipation of the entry in
force of the CPC. A more substantive harmonisation took place at around the same
time to take account of the European Patent Convention and the Strasbourg
Convention.
There was another attempt at European patents in 2000.
It does not seem to have got anywhere.
In the United Kindom, only
patents awarded by the UK Intellectual Property Office have legal force. The IPO
describes itself as the official government body responsible for granting
Intellectual Property (IP) rights in the United Kingdom. I have not found
anything on the EPO site that claims protection for EPO awarded patents in the
countries they cite as 'members'.
There were much earlier EU agreements
and treaties that did provide a unifying effect. From
Wikipedia:
The Convention on the Unification of Certain Points of
Substantive Law on Patents for Invention, also called Strasbourg Convention or
Strasbourg Patent Convention, is a multilateral treaty signed by Member States
of the Council of Europe on November 27, 1963 in Strasbourg, France. It entered
into force on August 1, 1980 and led to a significant harmonization of patent
laws across European countries.
This Convention establishes
patentability criteria, i.e. specifies on which grounds an inventions can be
rejected as not patentable. It intended to harmonize substantive patent law but
not procedural law. This Convention is quite different from the European Patent
Convention (EPC), which establishes an independent system for granting European
Patents.
The Strasbourg Convention has had a significant impact on the
EPC, on national patent laws across Europe, on the Patent Cooperation Treaty
(PCT), on the Patent Law Treaty (PLT) and on the WTO's TRIPS.
The
Strasbourg convention continues to extend its influence as more countries join
the EU.
---
Regards
Ian Al
Software Patents: It's the disclosed functions in the patent, stupid! [ Reply to This | Parent | # ]
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