L’Europe menacée par les «chasseurs de brevets»?

Wall Street Journal

BERLIN—Germany on Friday removed a legislative quirk that had made it a prime destination for globally active patent litigators who increasingly target fast-growing tech companies.

WIPR

Trade group IP2Innovate has warned that courts across Europe are failing to consider proportionality in patent cases, while urging the European Commission to promote similar reforms to those recently enacted in Germany.

In a recent  the German Conservatives (CDU/CSU) Elisabeth Winkelmeier-Becker and Ingmar Jung express concerns over abusive litigation practices by patent trolls, which distort the market and undermine Germany’s attractiveness as a business location. They note that in light of the high complexity of modern products, companies can no longer completely rule out the possibility of patent infringements. In this context, an unlimited right to injunctive relief create unwarranted leverage for patent trolls who buy up patents only to assert them against companies and extract disproportionately high settlements. Solutions proposed by CDU/CSU are the introduction of a proportionality test in the German Patent Act as well as a synchronisation of infringement and nullity proceedings.