Industry v European Patent Office

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The initiative of several large companies is dissatisfied with the patent examination in the European Patent Office. There, according to them, speed over accuracy. The department replies that everything is fine with their quality.

Industry v European Patent Office

Industry v European Patent Office

Criticism of the European Patent Office (EPO) comes from industry. Industry v. European Patent Office: The initiative, which now includes 21 companies, is concerned about the quality of patent examination. “Our impression is that the EPO is primarily interested in processing as many patents as possible,” Beat Weibel, Head of the Siemens Patent Office, who initiated the Industrial Patent Quality Charter (IPQC), says in an interview with Deutsche Presse-Agentur. .

Experts, according to him, are subject to ever-increasing industrial pressure and therefore are no longer able to carry out a sufficiently thorough examination.

“While we see the amount of work required for a patent application getting bigger and bigger on average, it has to be done faster and faster at the EPO,” Weibel explains. “This worries us because the quality of the expertise suffers as a result.” He says that he does not receive precise data from the EPO on the experts’ time budget. “But if you extrapolate the data to the number of experts and the number of patents granted, it turns out that over the past ten years their number has decreased by about half.”

The number of responses in the process of appealing patents has increased

Jörg Thomayer, head of the patent department at Bayer, which is also a member of IPQC, shares Waibel’s concerns. “In the past, the EPO was notorious for having lengthy examinations. In recent years, we have gotten the impression that there is more emphasis on speed and that the reviews are not as thorough anymore,” he says. “Things are moving faster now, but in response, there has been an increase in the number of recalls in the patent challenge process.”

Such revocation is extremely unfavorable for patent applicants. “Patents are extremely important for a company like Bayer,” says Thomayer. “It’s not so much the quantity that’s important, but that I can enforce them – if necessary – and that they won’t collapse at the first gust of wind on revision.” The Swiss group Roche, which also joined IPQC, says: “As an industry, we depend on strong patents. This is the basis for investing in our research.”

Largest applicant at the European Patent Office

Siemens is one of the largest applicants in the European Patent Office. Last year, the Munich-based company ranked sixth among EPO applicants and second among European companies, behind Ericsson. The Swedes are also members of the IPQC. “We wish examiners had more time to do their jobs because patents are getting more complex,” says Gabriele Mosler, vice president of patent business development. “In some cases, we saw that the search was not carried out thoroughly enough.”

On the whole, however, her assessment is not so critical: “In principle, I think that the quality at the EPO is good. But we don’t want it to go down, and in some areas it could be higher,” says Mosler.

Bayer’s Thomayer also says: “When compared globally, the quality of the EPO is not bad. But it is far from what it used to be: a pure gold standard. And that’s what we as an industry want to get back to.” The key solution, in his opinion, is to increase the number of employees. “For more applications, more experts are needed,” he emphasizes. “At the moment, our impression is that there is not enough capacity.”

EPO: “Quality always comes first”

For its part, the EPO emphasizes that the quality of patent searches “always has the highest priority”. Many countries consider his work “as a global benchmark for patent quality”. This is also reflected in studies by “leading intellectual property journals” in which the EPO “consistently ranks first among patent specialists”. However, some of the numbers used by IPQC are inaccurate.

In addition, the Patent Office notes that its Standing Advisory Committee has its own working group on quality, which includes 74 members from 40 countries. It also published a new Quality Charter last October, which “sets out our commitment to high quality and excellence at every stage of the patent granting process.”

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