18Here, it has to be observed that one of the choices facing an inventor when planning to obtain protection for his invention by the grant of a patent concerns the territorial scope of the desired protection, limited to a single Member State or covering several Member States. That choice is in principle the same, irrespective of whether the inventor applies for a European patent or uses the systems for the grant of national patents at present in force in the Member States. The choice will be made after an overall assessment of the advantages and drawbacks of each option, which includes complex economic evaluations of the commercial interest of having protection in the various States compared with the sum of the costs entailed in obtaining the grant of a patent in those States, including translation costs.
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