The European Patent Office (EPO) is an organ of the European Patent Organisation, an intergovernmental organisation that was set up on 7 October 1977 on the basis of the European Patent Convention (EPC) signed in Munich in 1973. The EPO is responsible for the uniform procedure to grant European patents. Once the EPO has granted a European patent, the patent holder can validate it in every single contracting state. In the future, the EPO will also be in charge of deciding on requests for unitary effect of European patents under the Unitary Patent system.
The recently released judgment in J1/24 (relating to EP 3660979B1), from the Legal Board of Appeal at the European Patent Office (EPO) is a divisive judgment, which could potentially have far-reaching implications. Existing legislation ignored/overturned by J1/24 The European Patent Convention is clear that a divisional application must be filed from a pending parent application,…
This is part II of an open letter directed to the President of the EPO in his capacity to give directions on the composition of Opposition Divisions. Article 19 EPC explicitly permits the Primary Examiner to be member of an Opposition Division. Many applicants and representatives, however, have a feeling of bias in favour of…
This is an open letter directed to the President of the EPO in his capacity to give directions on the composition of Opposition Divisions. Article 19 EPC explicitly permits the Primary Examiner to be member of an Opposition Division. Many applicants and representatives, however, have a feeling of bias in favour of the patentee before…
On 16 July 2024, the Munich Central Division revoked a patent for the first time in the litigation between Sanofi, Regeneron, and Amgen (UPC_CFI_1/2023). This decision is important not only because it is the first of its kind, but also because it establishes UPC’s position on the patentability of therapeutic antibody inventions. In this case,…
Becoming a European Patent Attorney is no trivial task. Candidates need to have a scientific or technical degree, work in one of the EPC member states and spend years on practical training to join our profession. After all this, they still need to pass the European Qualifying Examination (EQE) – arguably one of the hardest…
There are now three interesting developments, albeit in quite different areas, which have in common the effort to avoid stepping on banana skins on the path towards a more unified patent system. The first one, published last week, was a decision by the Court of Appeal (CoA) itself, which took the opportunity to clarify that…
Following the issuance of G 2/21 last year, we asked whether the plausibility elephant had left the room. Our Kluwer colleague and friend Miquel Montañá discussed this issue more recently here. Several decisions have meanwhile been issued applying the new “test” in G2/21, the lucidity of which may have reminded readers of the oracle of…
As William Blake put it in Auguries of Innocence, written in 1803 but not published until 1863, “A Robin Redbreast in a cage, puts all heaven in a rage”. So did the ill-crafted concept of plausibility with the case law of the EPO’s Technical Boards of Appeal (TBA). It introduced an artificial cage that trapped…
The Central Staff Committee (CSC) of the European Patent Office has published a paper on the activities of the Industry Patent Quality Charter, titled ‘50 years EPC – The EPO ignoring the skilled person’. The Industry Patent Quality Charter (IPQC) was started by Beat Weibel, chief IP Counsel at Siemens, in October 2022 out of…
The declining search and examination quality of EPO patents is not only harmful because inventions are not protected but they also create a lot of uncertainty for the industry. The problem has aggravated due to the Unitary Patent system, as thousands of Unitary Patents will flood countries where traditional European patents were not often validated…
