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 European Patent Office (EPO) is receiving ever increasing numbers of patent applications that include a ‘programmed computer’ as a key part of the described invention. Moreover, this growth in filings is being seen in technical fields that are not traditionally considered to be computer-centric. For example, according to EPO statistics, 40% of new patent…
The European Patent Office has opened an online consultation on the possibility of allowing more flexibility in the timing of the examination process by offering means to postpone the examination of European patent applications. The reasons for the consultation are explained on the EPO’s website: ‘Since the launch of the Early Certainty initiative in 2014,…
The number of inventive step attacks in opposition procedures at the European Patent Office may be constrained in the future due to a recent change in the EPO Guidelines. According to David Brophy, partner at FRKelly, the change will improve efficiency, although the restrictions may also open up a new avenue for criticising decisions on…
On November 5th 2018 the Eastern High Court of Denmark ruled in favor of Hollister Inc. in a case regarding an invention described in a patent claim filed by Hollister Inc. Coloplast A/S claimed they were co-inventors of the invention and therefore co-owners of it. However, the Eastern High Court found that Coloplast had failed…
Setting the record straight concerning the right to dependent claims under the EPC by Thomas Wyder and Stephan Steinmüller (Hoffmann Eitle) EPO Examiners sometimes urge Applicants to delete dependent claims considered to relate to “unsearched subject-matter” after having raised a unity a posteriori objection. We are investigating in how far the EPC justifies forcing an…
The Administrative Council of the European Patent Office must act and support president António Campinos in initiatives to end ‘the persistent atmosphere of intimidation’ at the EPO. That is the message of a letter which was sent to the heads of delegation of the Administrative Council (AC) earlier this week by the EPO-FLIER Team, ‘a…
Over the past few years the pan-European and parallel national patent litigation based on Eli Lilly’s pemetrexed patent has attracted considerable attention, as it has resulted in a number of diverse land mark decisions in relation to the doctrine of equivalence, as evidenced by the various posts on the Kluwer Patent Blog. By way of…
For the first time, the European Patent Office has revoked a patent as a consequence of amended regulations which exclude plants and animals obtained by an essentially biological breeding process for patentability. The revocation, last month, concerned European patent number 1.597.965, covering a type of broccoli adapted to make harvesting easier. The patent was granted…
The European Patent Office and representatives of 14 German law firms who had expressed concerns about EPO patent quality earlier this year in a letter, have started a “constructive dialogue”. The representatives had a meeting with the new President of the European Patent Office, António Campinos, and other EPO officials, on 16 October 2018 in…
For the first time, the European Patent Office has published guidelines on the patentability of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) technologies. The guidelines (G-II 3.3.1) came into force on 1 November 2018. As the guidelines provide, AI and ML are “based on computational models and algorithms for classification, clustering, regression and dimensionality reduction,…
