The European Commission expects a deal on a unified patent within days, paving the way for an agreement to be signed by 25 EU member states on 22 December in Warsaw.

One notable sticking-point remains – the location of the court to deal with litigation issues arising from the patent regime, with Munich, London and Paris all vying for the seat. According to EU officials, Paris is the front-runner, but ministers from Germany and the UK did not back down during lengthy talks in Brussels on Monday night (5 December).

However, the competitiveness council did agree on the locations for the court of appeal, which will be in Luxembourg, as well as for offices for the patent mediation and arbitration centre, with seats in Lisbon and Ljubljana.

The deal would represent the end of a 30-year-long battle to create an EU-wide patent. The scheme was blocked for many years over disagreements on the language regime, with Italy and Spain demanding that their languages be included. The logjam was removed when the other 25 countries decided to go ahead without Italy and Spain under the process of enhanced co-operation, enabled by the Lisbon Treaty, with a language regime that consisted of English, French and German.

Near the finishing-line

Michel Barnier, the European commissioner for the internal market, said that the EU was “almost at the finishing-line now, and it’s been a very long race. In a few days we can cross the finishing-line”.

If the last remaining obstacle can be overcome and the so-called Warsaw convention is initialled on 22 December, the package will be adopted by the plenary session of the European Parliament in February 2012. An international agreement to create the court would be scheduled for the first half of next year and the new regime would come into force at the beginning of 2014.

Officials from Poland, which holds the rotating presidency of the EU’s council of ministers, were eager to reach a deal on the patent, having made it a priority of their six-month term that finishes at the end of the year. They held five meetings with MEPs and officials from the European Commission, and a deal was reached between the three sides on 1 December.

‘Important stimulus’

Waldemar Pawlak, Poland’s economy minister, said he expected that a compromise could be reached in time for a signing ceremony on 22 December. He said that the unified patent represented an “important stimulus for the single market”, which would lower the price for patents and improve the competitiveness of the EU.

Bernhard Rapkay, a German centre-left MEP, who took part in the talks on behalf of the Parliament, described the deal between MEPs and member states as an “outstanding achievement that finally puts an end to ten years of stalling by the European governments”.

Businesses, which have been promoting the need for a unified patent for decades, have welcomed the deal. Arnaldo Abruzzini, the secretary-general of Eurochambres, the European association of chambers of commerce and industry, said that the new system would prove more efficient than the “current patchwork of national regimes”.

He added that small and medium-sized companies filed few patents and were less successful in being awarded patents than big firms. He said that agreement on a unified patent would “reduce that disparity and help, in particular, new-tech SMEs to protect their intellectual property and enhance their competitive edge”.