Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2007-12-11-Speech-2-411"
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"en.20071211.42.2-411"2
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Madam President, ladies and gentlemen, we come today to the provisional end of a discussion that has lasted for 17 years. I recall that, when I was first elected to this House in 1994, we were already trying to get our heads around this issue. We did not reach a conclusion then. All we managed to do in the conciliation procedure was put the matter on ice. A few years ago the Commission presented a new proposal, which has again taken quite some time to deal with, but it can finally be brought to an end now, at least at first reading.
I shall come straight in with the counterargument, however. We have a single European market and – as Commissioner McCreevy quite rightly observed – a situation in which two-thirds of the Member States have liberalised their aftermarkets and therefore do not protect the design of spare parts, while the other third do. The fact is that the creation of a single market in Europe entails the creation of common legal rules, and it is not unusual in such cases to follow the majority principle.
In my view there has always been a compromise solution, for which I canvassed together with Commissioner Monti back in the nineties. That was the idea of the compulsory licence, which would have meant that any manufacturer could reproduce parts subject to payment of a licence fee to the owner of the design rights.
Incidentally, we have a very similar arrangement in the realm of copyright, so no one can tell me that it is not an option. It would have served both to protect the design and to create a market. Regrettably, it did not attract majority support in the House or in the Council.
We were thus left to draw the conclusion that we should liberalise and that we should create a transitional period to protect Member States that needed some time to adapt. Then there remained the issue as to whether five or eight years’ grace should be allowed. My Group, like the Committee on Legal Affairs, opted for five years; I have heard that the Socialist Group favours eight years.
The crux of the matter is that, when Parliament votes tomorrow on the question of whether five or eight years should appear in the text, it will be signalling that the Council needs to agree on a transitional period. I know from talks with the Slovenian Presidency that their proposals will tend to aim for a longer rather than a shorter grace period. I certainly wish the Slovenian Presidency good fortune in its efforts.
There is one thing, I believe, that we should bear in mind for the second reading. Should the Council actually arrive at an agreement, we in Parliament should resolve not to complicate matters at second reading. The issue does not merit protracted wrangling, and it is high time it was brought to a conclusion. The present draft is our contribution to the pursuit of that aim.
What is being proposed here and what is on the table is essentially what the Commission has put forward, namely liberalisation of the market in spare parts, albeit with a five-year transitional period for Member States in which spare parts are covered by design protection.
For 17 years I have been listening to arguments for and against. Most of them are unconvincing. Allow me to cite a number of examples. First of all, there was the argument that consumer prices would be lower if the repair clause were introduced. There is no empirical evidence at all for that claim – quite the contrary. Comparative data on spare-part prices in Britain, where the market is liberalised, and Germany, where it is not, show that, paradoxically, prices for spare parts are higher in Britain than in Germany.
Besides, it is not rocket science: vehicle manufacturers must recoup their design costs somewhere. If they cannot recoup some of them from the sale of spare parts, it is logical that they will have to pass them on through the price of new cars, and so cars will become more expensive. In that case too, the consumer is the one who pays.
The same applies, by the way, to insurance premiums. Some of the cost of buying new cars, as we know, is covered by insurance policies. If premiums rise, that does not help consumers either. One way or another, they always have to foot the bill.
Nor am I really convinced by the argument that the motor industry needs design protection to fend off competitors from the Far East that are threatening its markets, for in no time at all we shall see how the industry finds other ways to protect its spare parts: patenting intelligent car bonnets and intelligent wing mirrors, protecting other parts through trade mark legislation by simply incorporating particular logos into them, imposing conditions of warranty and other practices.
The safety argument, as our impact assessment has demonstrated, is not ultimately watertight either, because safety, as we well know, can be ensured by means of type testing.
I cite these because I believe that all the arguments that have been advanced are ultimately spurious and have not provided clear answers to the fundamental question.
When all is said and done, there remain two key arguments which I recognise. One of them is the copyright argument, which says that exemplary protection must be given in Europe to intellectual property rights, and indeed I take the view that what we are about to adopt here will probably send the wrong signal to China and India and that our task as Europeans is actually to defend the rights attaching to intellectual property."@en1
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