The European Commission has now proposed, and European ministers approved, a simplified work programme for 2025 that includes withdrawing nearly 40 legislative proposals.   

One of those proposals was the draft Regulation on Standard-Essential Patents.

The Commission explained its streamlined Work Programme as a means of reducing administrative and regulatory burdens and focusing on fostering innovation and competitiveness within the EU. By exercising its right to withdraw proposals where consensus among European co-legislators is unlikely, the Commission demonstrates its commitment to legislative simplification. 

Here are some of the main reasons we think that the Commission decision makes sense.  

Reducing regulatory burden

First, after every election, the new European Commission leadership agrees on new priorities for its legislative programme in line with the EU’s most pressing issues. In adopting its 2025 Work Programme, the Commission withdrew nearly 40 measures. That move was intended to dispense with burdensome regulation and help improve the EU’s competitiveness. Several reports, including a report by former Italian Prime Minister Mario Draghi and the Commission’s own Competitiveness Compass, have recently argued that the EU is falling behind its global peers in competitiveness, partly because of over-regulation.

Second, the Commission is justified in withdrawing proposed legislation where there is no foreseeable likelihood of agreement amongst the European co-legislators (a right affirmed by the European Court in case C-409/13). This seems to be the case: The Council hasn’t begun its work on the draft in earnest. Moreover, on 28 February 2025, exactly a year after the Parliament adopted its resolution, the Council Working Party on IP held an exchange of views following the Commission’s intention to withdraw the text. Reports suggested that there was no political agreement. 

The Commission’s competitiveness focus 

In its recent Competitiveness Compass, the EU committed to reduce administrative burdens and encourage investment in leading technologies . The Compass draws on the earlier Letta and Draghi reports, as well as on the Council Conclusions in 2024 and business concerns.  

Presenting the Commission’s 2025 Work Programme, Valdis Dombrovskis, Commissioner for Economy and Productivity; Implementation and Simplification, stated:

“European businesses should spend less time and resources complying with red tape, so that they can instead focus on what really matters: developing innovative ideas, putting them into motion in Europe and creating high-quality jobs. Every hour saved on paperwork can be a win for all Europeans.” 

The SEP Regulation would have created new and burdensome procedures. It also would have significantly reduced incentives for European innovators, including SMEs and start-ups, to participate in R&D and standard-setting activities.  

The draft Regulation also contradicted other EU priorities, including: 

• EU standardisation ambitions: Europe’s position in the international standardisation ecosystem is at risk, as other jurisdictions recognise the strategic importance of standards and due to increased technological competition.  The draft Regulation risked undermining European leadership in standard-setting for critical technologies such as 5G, 6G, AI, and the Internet of Things (IoT) by imposing additional regulatory hurdles and introducing new administrative complexity and legal uncertainty.  The withdrawal of the draft Regulation recognises that the EU should foster R&D, standardisation–and those European companies that remain active in global standardisation.  

• Support for SMEs:  the draft Regulation was intended to bring transparency and clarity for SMEs. Yet the flood of information it would have generated (much of it available elsewhere) would not have been helpful. The SME support mechanisms the Commission proposed also duplicated existing initiatives run by national patent offices, European standard development organisations (e.g., ETSI, CEN/CENELEC), and industry groups. Supporting SMEs and scale-ups in standardisation does not require a regulation. 

The Commission’s own impact assessment recognised that “Existing empirical evidence on the causal effects of current SEP licensing conditions is largely inconclusive.”  

Significant outstanding questions  

There also remain many fundamental (constitutional) questions such as:

• the compatibility of the draft Regulation with WTO/TRIPS (given the regulation seeks to affect global licensing, including non-European patents);
• the risk of bifurcating the European Patent Office (EPO) and new Unitary Patent and Unified Patent Court (UPC) systems.
• its compatibility with the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights (given the impact of access to courts and IP protection under Art 17(2));
• the capacity and competence of EU Intellectual Property Office (EUIPO) to manage the Regulation, given it has no expertise in patent rights or technology standards to-date; and

Concerns about the workability and impact of the Regulation also remain. For example, the draft Regulation would have created an untested process for licensing standardised technologies, resulting in uncertainty for both standard developers and implementers. Any uncertainty will likely disrupt well-functioning markets.  

In addition, the novel legal concepts introduced by the draft Regulation would likely result in legal disputes, further exacerbating legal uncertainty. In particular, the draft Regulation proposed a series of complex and technical processes (e.g., SEP registers, databases, expert opinions, and non-binding yet mandatory conciliation mechanisms) that are already undertaken by established standardisation bodies such as CEN and CENELEC as well as expert patent organisations, including the EPO and UPC’s Patent Mediation and Arbitration Centre. No one has suggested that these existing bodies are failing. Given this, the Regulation would have created overlap and redundancy between competing processes. 

Europe has debated harmonising its intellectual property landscape since the early 1950s. It finally resulted in the 2023 creation of the UPC, a much-needed one-stop shop. This harmonisation is a crucial element for European innovation and competitiveness, as recognised by Draghi.  

Leaders in the European IP legal community, patent professionals, judges working with UPC, EPO staff, as well as national judges, repeatedly voiced their concerns over the draft SEP regulation. Under these circumstances, the Commission has done the right thing to simplify its Work Programme by withdrawing such a text, leaving space for further constructive discussions.