Multinational Patent Enforcement: What the 'Parochial' United States Can Learn from Past and Present European Initiatives J.D., Cornell Law School

摘要

The historic territoriality of patent law fundamentally clashes with the increasingly global technology that it seeks to protect. As a result, in order to protect their inventions on an international level as required in today's global marketplace, inventors are forced to pursue duplicative litigations on a nation-by-nation basis. In response, advocates in both Europe and the United States have called for multinational patent enforcement, which has tremendous potential advantages over multiple suits in various national courts. Beginning in 1989, Dutch courts led Europe in a multinational patent enforcement trend, attacking the conventional territoriality of patent rights. In contrast, mainly due to international comity concerns, U.S. courts remain reluctant to exercise jurisdiction over foreign patent claims, leading to a handful of futile attempts to litigate foreign patents in the United States. As the Federal Circuit's opinion on the issue awaited clarification in Voda v. Cordis Corp., intervening ECJ decisions crushed the multinational patent enforcement trend in European courts, leading to an increased emphasis on both the Community Patent and the EPLA in an attempt to unify the disjointed European patent litigation system. The ECJ decisions, which largely destroy the potential for multinational patent enforcement in European national courts, as well as the proposed judicial systems in the Community Patent initiative and the EPLA, demonstrate European nations' continued hesitance to allow foreign national courts to adjudicate patents effective in their territory and, thus, reinforce the logic of U.S. courts that have refused to exercise jurisdiction over foreign patent claims. Furthermore, the inefficiencies evident in past multinational patent enforcement efforts in European national courts establish that unavoidable parallel and collateral proceedings in foreign national courts result in substantial expense, delay, and uncertainty for litigants. As a result of these difficulties and the recent ECJ decisions, the drive for both the more-readily-attainable EPLA and the ideal Community Patent show that Europe has realized that multinational agreements to establish a common patent judicial system are the appropriate means to ensure uniform, efficient multinational patent enforcement. Thus, as past and present European initiatives illustrate, multinational patent enforcement in national courts is only an intermediate solution in the long and difficult path toward the effective protection of international patent rights.