EPO

The EPO management has been under increasing criticism for its perceived lack of attention for the deteriorating quality of EPO patents. The subject was put on the agenda prominently last year in…

The European Patent Convention (EPC) is used daily by many patent practitioners and is essential reading for the thousands of candidates taking the European Qualifying Examination (EQE) each year…

From the company name of an appellant alone it can generally not be derived that the appellant does not meet the conditions of Rule 6(4,5) EPC for payment of the reduced appeal fee. This applies even…

The European Patent Office received 193 460 applications last year, an increase of 2.5% compared to 2021 and a new record. Digital communication (+11.2% over 2021) was the field with the highest…

This year’s release of Visser’s Annotated European Patent Convention, or as it is commonly known, simply "Visser" is just around the corner. Since the previous edition, updated until March 2022,…

The Central Staff Committee of the European Patent Office supports the initiative of important European companies who’ve requested to do something about declining patent quality at the EPO. In a…

The industry has serious concerns about the deteriorating patent quality at the European Patent Office. The issue was discussed earlier this month between the EPO and the Industry Patent Quality…

The EPO has opened its public user consultation on the latest version of the EPC and PCT-EPO Guidelines, which will come into force on 1 March 2023. Users are invited to submit their comments in any…

An outburst of anger of a president and his re-election, social tensions, industrial actions: for anyone familiar with the world of patents it will be clear that all this refers to the European…