There is a will on the side of the European Patent Office to make patent prosecution more effective and faster.
Raising the bar of patent quality was a theme some years ago, when the EPO encouraged representatives to draft patent applications according to European Patent Convention (EPC) standards.
The aim was fewer examination communications, to the expected benefit of both EPO, in view of reduced workload of the examiners, and the applicant because of lower patent prosecution costs.
The Guidelines for Examination in the EPO instruct examiners to use the ‘problem-and-solution’ approach to determine inventive step. The ‘problem-and-solution’ approach tells that to deprive an invention of inventive step, there has to be something (an ‘incentive’) in the closest prior art that would prompt a given skilled person to combine the cited documents.
The rest of this article is locked for subscribers only. Please login to continue reading.
If you don't have a login, you will need to purchase a subscription to gain access to this article, including all our online content. Please use this link and follow the steps.
For multi-user price options, or to check if your company has an existing subscription to us that we can add you to for FREE, please email Atif Choudhury at achoudhury@worldipreview.com
EPO, patent prosecution, examination, EPC, PCT
