This was indeed a lobbying effort, people who were pushing for it called themselves “experts”, which they might be with regards to patent law. But for that matter, they were just lobbyists pushing for their particular interest (having CJEU as less as possible involved in patent litigation), forgetting some basic rules of Union Law, and more generally some fundamental democratic rights and freedoms.

That’s why I call them a “patent microcosm”: they wanna push for a European patent infrastructure that would be isolated from the rest of judicial and institutional EU framework.

It should be noted that these same people (eg. Pagenberg & Jacob) were already in the advising group of “experts” for the Commission, who have led to the previous EEUPC project for setting up a unified patent court. But CJEU was very clear on the non-compliance of the EEUPC project with the EU treaties: it “would [have altered] the essential character of the powers conferred on the institutions of the European Union and on the Member States which are indispensable to the preservation of the very nature of European Union law”.

Now, Pagenberg is frustrated by having being called a “lobbyist” by JURI rapporteur (Rapkay) & chairman (Lehne) and that the Commission has chosen to not hear the “group of experts” anymore. But this can also be seen as a good way to build a practical patent system for the benefits of the European society & economy as a whole, instead of particular interests of the patent microcosms. But unfortunately this hasn’t restored a balanced policy-making decision, since independent experts (academics who writes about the patent system inserted in a more general EU innovation policy & legal framework) are not being heard either.

Commissioner Barnier, the EPO and the self-proclaimed representative of industry (Thierry Sueur, lobbyist for BusinessEurope who actually doesn’t represent EU enterprises, but rather IP legal departments of big firms) seem to having adopted the stubborn attitude to conclude this project, whatever its flaws and inefficiencies, just to achieve a result where all previous attempts for more than 40 years have felt.

For an overview of real flaws, as denounced by academics, of the Unitary Patent project, I’ve just published a post: Academics confirm flaws in the unitary patent.