A Spanish view of the EU Patent

My friends at J Isern Patentes y Marcas point out in an interesting article that the Spanish position on the EU patent, understandable as it may be as a means of preserving the importance of a major European language, will put Spanish businesses at a disadvantage, relegating them to a second division within the EU. Pepe Isern concludes:

El sacrificio en aras de una patente única debería haber sido para todas los países por igual y en todo caso establecer como lengua franca el inglés.

Or, per Google:

The sacrifice for the sake of a single patent should have been to all countries equally and in any case to establish English as a lingua franca.

Which has come to mean a language adopted as a common language between speakers whose native languages are different, but originally meant the blend of Italian with French, Greek, Arabic, and ironically Spanish, used in the Levant. I guess the fate of English is inevitably to be a lingua franca in the modern sense: good  for the rest of the world, good for English-speakers (who don't have to bother learning others' languages - I was being ironic there, because what are they missing out on?), bad for the English language. But the point is made that 85 per cent of scientific and technical literature is in the form of patent specifications: of course those specifications are available to researchers in Spain whether or not Spain joins the unified patent system, and the problem is that Spanish innovation will not be as fully protected as innovation in other EU countries. However, isn't the larger part of that 85 per cent going to be in English anyway? Should the European Union just go with the flow?