Google Translate-a step forward for patents?
By Emma Peart
A new deal has been announced that could open up the intellectual property market. The European Patent Office has announced that it is arranging a deal that will ease the translation of Patents.
Part of the well known Google name consists of an on-line translation service named “Google Translate”. Perhaps spotting the potential benefits to protecting intellectual property rights by ensuring the translation of patents into other languages and the potential ease to commercial activity internationally, the EPO has agreed use of Google Translate.
Under the memorandum of understanding, the translation service will be applied to all new patent applications of the EPO, both from the office’s 38 member countries and from companies and inventors outside Europe. It will also be given access to patent documents sitting in the EPO’s archive, which have already undergone traditional manual translations.
In brief this will allow persons within a wide range of countries internationally to search whether an idea has been patented across the wide areas involved by doing a general search in their native tongue.
Not only should this help commerce by encouraging ideas to be marketed if they can check their ideas are not contravening a patent but it is paving the way towards another current idea-a single European Patent. The costs for a single Patent would undoubtedly cause less of a financial headache for a business than the cost of several if the company wishes to market an idea in more than one country. At the moment there is some opposition from some European Countries to the idea, but the negotiations regarding translation with Google makes a stronger argument for a European patent given translation would be easier and less costly.
However the deal could perhaps highlight another area of concern for the European Union, as highlighted in another matter concerning Google-that of breach of competition law.
There have previously been concerns raised over Google Books (previously known as Google Book Search).This is a service launched by Google in 2004 that allows people to search and perhaps download a vast number of books that have been scanned-approximately 10 million titles. Among the many issues that the European Commission has raised is the potential effect that allowing one company to potentially have such a big share in the digitalisation of books could be a breach of competition law. Could the same concern be raised with the issue of the translation system? It may be worth noting that Google does not expect any immediate financial profit from the deal, according to Carlo d’Asaro Biondo, Google’s Vice President for Southern and Eastern Europe, the Middle East and Africa.
