The London Agreement, which was contracted in London on October 17, 2000, is briefly before coming into effect after the French Parliament has agreed to the draft law of ratification of the London Agreement on September 26, 2007. On October 09, 2007 the French Senate also accepted this law. Therefore, France is able to deposit the ratification certificate. As soon as France has deposited the ratification certificate, the conditions for coming into effect of the London Agreement is fulfilled. The London Agreement will come into effect on the first day of the forth month after depositing the ratification certificate.

The contracting parties of the agreement oblige themselves to abandon the filing of translations of European patents into their national language totally or to a large extent. For this purpose, the member states determine an official language of the European Parliament, in case they do not have an official language of the European Parliament, for which a translation is not necessary, if the patent exists in this language.

Therefore, the translation requirements are clearly limited and a large cost factor is therefore considerably reduced. For all people who have been discouraged to file a European patent by high translation costs after the issue of the patent up to now, this barrier will not exist anymore after the coming into effect of the London Agreement. Since the coming into effect is likely to happen soon, all the people, who deal with the decision of filing a European patent or not, should consider, that the requirement of necessary translations will be highly reduced in the future.

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