A new president of the European Patent Organisation, the person who will succeed the controversial president Benoît Battistelli in June 2018, will be chosen this autumn. That is the expectation of…
The SUEPO, the biggest trade union at the European Patent Organisation, filed a complaint against The Netherlands before the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) on 8 May 2017. According to the…
An EPO board of appeal expressed its opinion that EBA case law implied that no further use should be made of the three-part “essentiality test” of T 331/87, for deciding whether removal of a feature…
A board of appeal of the European patent office held that a decision to reject an opposition with grounds based on an improperly corrected version of the patent as granted maintains the text used in…
The enlarged board of appeal (EBA) of the European patent office effectively ended the possibility of poisonous priority. The EBA held that entitlement to partial priority may not be refused for a…
The duration of proceedings before the Boards of Appeal (BoA) currently is the EPO’s biggest problem in regard to speed. According to the latest Annual Report by the Boards of Appeal, the average…
Early certainty in opposition proceedings is clearly a desirable objective, and the President’s commitment to lowering the average duration of (normal) opposition proceedings to 15 months on the…
The current President of the EPO claims in his blog that there is a general demand from the users of the EPO – i.e. primarily the applicants – to have a timely delivery of the work product of the EPO…
How long should proceedings before the EPO ideally take? Admittedly, this is a tricky question because various stakeholders will usually have different interests and thoughts as to what the “right”…
