EPO President Battistelli Tells Of ‘Patent Wars’, As IP5 Consolidate Work

CAPE TOWN – A growing patent examination workload and increasing global anti-IP sentiment are some of the challenges the European Patent Office faces, according to EPO President Benoit Battistelli.

Battistelli spoke on 15 April at the FICPI 2015 World Congress, currently underway in Cape Town, South Africa.

Battistelli told participants that the so-called “patent wars”, as well as doubts about patent quality, including uncertainty surrounding patent validity and disputes around standard essential patents, were part of a growing anti-IP sentiment.

Another challenge the EPO faces, according to its president, is the rapidly growing volumes of prior art, particularly from Asia.

However, Battistelli acknowledged that the EPO was meeting these challenges with a focused approach.

Strategic EPO priorities he identified included “maintaining a strong focus on quality, improving efficiency and harmonising the global patent system.”

In order to face the growing demand for patents, the EPO is modernising itself and implementing a wide range of reforms in the areas of IT and human resources, amongst others.

Battistelli outlined specific measures by the EPO with regards to search and examination procedures, including intensive training for EPO officers and comprehensive prior art coverage with over 90 million patent documents available to examiners.

Battiselli emphasised enhancing quality to improve legal certainty and confirmed that this was helped by a global prior art search and that the EPO had access to 35 million patent documents from China, Japan and Korea. He added that 21 percent of cited prior art in the EPO search reports comes from Asia and that the organisation uses automated translation in the form of Patent Translate, which allows for free “on the fly translations of patents for 32 languages, including Chinese, Japanese, Korean and Russian.”

The five IP offices (IP5) is the name given to a forum of the five largest intellectual property offices in the world, which are working together to improve the efficiency of the examination process for patents worldwide. The members of IP5 are:

• the European Patent Office (EPO)
• the Japan Patent Office (JPO)
• the Korean Intellectual Property Office (KIPO)
• the State Intellectual Property Office of the People’s Republic of China (SIPO)
• and the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO)

The IP5 patent offices, of which the EPO is a member, together handle about 80 percent of the world’s patent applications, and 95 percent of all work carried out under the Patent Cooperation Treaty (PCT), according to the IP5 website.

EPO Global Dossier Adds Japan, Korea Data

Battiselli used the opportunity to announce that, as of 15 April, the EPO’s Global Dossier service will include data from the Japan Patent Office (JPO) and the Korean Intellectual Property Office (KIPO).

The Global Dossier Task Force was created by the IP5 offices in June 2012 to modernise the global patent system to simplify the application process and allow for work sharing between IP offices, reducing duplication and redundancy.

Battiselli said that the global dossier envisages applicants and the public being able to access patent information amongst other things.

The EPO president summed up the EPO achievements in the context of the IP5 cooperation which has been ongoing for eight years.

‘We have focused on achieving concrete results,” he said. “The Global Dossier, common citation document, cooperative patent classification, common application format and the IP5 patent information policy are some examples of real achievements to date.”

Harmonisation Concern

Separately, Ellen ’t Hoen, founder of the Medicines Patent Pool, said at the event: “A key concern is the drive towards greater global harmonisation of patent law which is a central theme of this meeting. This inevitably lead to harmonising upwards. I am concerned about the loss of flexibilities that currently exist under international law if further European and international harmonisation takes place’.”