Hi all,

I hope you are well and I am sorry I couldn't meet most of you in Munich last week! I got this Politico article from a few weeks ago (it's usually behind a paywall, so please don't forward) via the Greens in the European parliament. It seems mostly to be about software and pharmaceuticals, but it's not clear if the licensing part for example will go beyond that. If anyone knows more about this, please share :) I will follow-up with the Greens on this and Katherine is trying to get a meeting with the European Commission about patents in general.

Best, Dagmar

· EU patent package coming, according to Politico

PATENT PACKAGE: Brussels' industry groups are preparing themselves for a suite of proposals slated for April 26 that will regulate how businesses that rely on patents for profits let other companies use their technologies.

Holders vs implementers: The European Commission will table legislative and non-legislative policies in three areas: compulsory licensing of patents, a review of existing supplementary protection certificate rules and standard essential patents, or SEPs. The latter are a highly sensitive topic that pits everyone from Big Tech giants to open software campaigners against patent holders, which includes a relatively small group of companies including Nokia, Qualcomm and Ericsson. Small business associations are also getting in on the act. The European Digital SME Alliance launched an ongoing surveyhttps://www.digitalsme.eu/call-for-action-making-seps-work-for-all-businesses/ at the end of last year to find out if its members were being targeted by SEP holders.

Patent trolls that use patents as a legal weapon to claim rights to proceeds from a company's own products or stop them being developed altogether are one of the biggest bones of contention for the implementers, said Ciarán O'Riordan, senior policy adviser at non-profit Open Forum Europe. "The Commission hasn't really published much about how they plan to solve this issue," he said. "They've talked about how they want to increase transparency," but "how do you remove the lack of clarity or how do you increase transparency in a way that's actually useful in a way that solves the problem?"

"One thing that we would love to see happen would be something to clarify the software is not patentable in the first place," he said.

Also, next week: Industry ministers will meet at the Competitiveness Council on March 2 where they will get an update on the state of play for the new unitary patent system that will come into effecthttps://pro.politico.eu/press/149878 on June 1 as well as the EU's new Unified Patent Court.

· Bayer providing free access

Bayer offers small vegetable breeding companies in the European Union access free of cost to our European patents on traits in vegetables which are in the Euroseeds PINTO database and licensable by Bayer.https://www.bayer.com/en/agriculture/free-access-to-patented-innovation-for-...