Wanted - a Patent Court to protect inventors' ideas across EU borders

There is still no European Patent Court, Lord Hoffmann, a senior judge, complained last week. The EU's failure to set up a simple scheme for protecting inventions across Europe is bad news for British inventors - especially those who do not have the backing of large companies. Since a court ruling in one country has no effect in others, it can cost millions to protect an invention across Europe.

Ruling in March on a banknote security patent that had been successfully challenged in some European countries but upheld in others, Lord Justice Jacob said the appeal "illustrates once again the need for a one-stop patent shop".

The invention at the heart of last week's appeal to the House of Lords was a modified stent - a tiny wire-mesh tube used to hold blood vessels open in patients with heart disease.

When these tubes were first developed, there were sometimes problems: the stent could encourage the growth of new tissue, closing up the arteries again. Then a young Canadian medical student discovered that a well-known anti-cancer drug called taxol would stop the new tissue growing. He had the idea of coating the stent with it.

The taxol stent, patented by Angiotech Pharmaceuticals in 1997, became a great commercial success. But the patent was challenged by a US competitor-which claimed it was obvious to coat the stent with something and that taxol had always been "worth a try". A device cannot be patented if it obvious.

Angiotech replied that it was not obvious to coat the stent with taxol. That was what was inventive. The US competitor, Conor, was successful in the High Court and the Court of Appeal. But Conor's request for revocation of Angiotech's patent was dismissed by a district court in The Hague and also last week by the Law Lords. Lord Hoffmann decided that coating the stent with taxol was what was being patented - and that was far from obvious.

The different rulings from courts in the Netherlands and England came as no surprise to patent attorneys - agents who register inventions for clients. "It has taken three English court hearings, costing hundreds of thousands of pounds, to arrive at a decision that had already been made in a Dutch court," said Rob Jackson, a spokesman for the Chartered Institute of Patent Attorneys.

There is already a European Patent Office in Munich that examines inventionsand grants "European" patents. But Jackson, a patent attorney litigator himself, explains that these are no more than a bundle of national patents - "any one of which can be challenged in the courts of the country to which it applies".

There must be a better way, say the patent attorneys. Clearly, we need a patent that can be granted centrally and will then be binding in all European countries through a unified system of litigation.

The problem is that there are now 27 EU states using 23 official languages, if you include Irish. Specialist translation into all these languages would be prohibitively expensive - and yet a developer might reasonably expect to read a patent in his own language if he is to be penalised for infringing it.