AFTER decades of wrangling and three formal proposals to the European Council, the project to create a single patent valid throughout the EU is finally dead, killed off because it cannot be only in English.

A final attempt to push a language compromise through the EU’s Competitiveness Council has failed, provoking a blistering response from Frits Bolkestein, the Dutch Internal Markets Commissioner. Pronouncing the council’s failure to agree “a fiasco”, he attacked member states whose “institutions and practices have become encrusted and don’t wish to change”.

A single application to a single authority would have protected inventions throughout the 25 states of the EU. But it failed to account for lawyers and bureacrats anxious to protect the lucrative business of processing national patents.

“The trouble is language,” Mr Bolkestein said. “Some member states say we should just use one language, namely English, but one member state does not agree to that.”

A compromise — that applications be permitted in English, French and German — was complicated by Spain, which insisted a patent’s “claims” be translated into all 19 official languages of the EU.

That was accepted until this week when Germany protested at the cost of translation, a thinly veiled attempt to scupper a project that threatened the German patent courts.