Mr. Naoise Gaffney:

Whether the company is small or very large, patenting is typically a global game. There are very few enterprises, even the smallest ones in Ireland, that would be content just with securing protection within the Irish market and not going further afield. The desire here is to get protection in as many other markets as it might be reasonably foreseeable for one to look to do business in.

We are focused here on the reform of the European system, so I will answer the question with regard to Europe. There is a centralised clearing house for the granting of patents called the European Patent Office, EPO. The process to get to the point where the EPO would give one the thumbs up and say one can have a patent, is one chunk of cost. However, the EPO does not grant a single patent that covers all of Europe and instead, it gives one the option to get individual national patents in all of the participating member countries. That is where considerable cost tends to kick in. The cost of engaging with the EPO up to that point is unavoidable and will not change, but the first real saving to be achieved is at the validation stage.

That is where one takes the thumbs-up and turns it into a real patent. Every additional country that one would like to seek protection in could cost another €2,000 to €3,000. A significant issue is translation into international languages. That is on top of the initial sunk cost that one probably incurred, of between €7,000 and €15,000, to get to the point where the EPO has given a thumbs-up. In every year in which one wishes to keep the patents in force, one has to pay each individual national patent office a premium. That is designed to ensure there is not a backlog of patents that people do not want. Things die if people will not pay to keep them alive. The cost really bites in the context of enforcement. No one wants to litigate but sometimes people need to defend their rights. If they want to litigate in Europe, they need to do so in every jurisdiction where they have a patent in force. They need to go to Germany, France and the Netherlands. Each litigation will cost hundreds of thousands of euro.

Now, for the first time, there is an opportunity to just do that once rather than doing it five times in different jurisdictions. It is expensive anyway and will potentially still be out of the reach of small and medium enterprises, SMEs, but thankfully the Unified Patent Court, UPC, system provides specific financial supports for SMEs to use the system. It was the EU's intention to make this as accessible as possible to SMEs. There are significant savings to be had on the litigation front too. At present, many SMEs may only have one or two patents. That may not be because they only have one or two technologies worth protecting but because those are the technologies SMEs can afford to protect. If it gets cheaper, they will be able to protect more.