Whereas the duration of the protection granted by the certificate should be such as to provide adequate effective protection; whereas , for this purpose , the holder of both a patent and a certificate should be able to enjoy an overall maximum of fifteen years of exclusively from the time the medicinal product in question first obtains authorization to be placed on the market in the Community.. This sentence is hard to understand. A simpler version with equivalent meaning is the following:
The duration of the protection granted by the certificate must be determined in such a way that sufficient actual protection is achieved . To this end , the person who holds a patent and a certificate at the same time must be granted a maximum of fifteen years of exclusivity from the first authorization to place the medicinal product on the market in the Community .