EPO defends claims it favours big applicants
The European Patent Office (EPO) has defended itself against accusations that it favours major technology companies when assessing patent applications.
According to leaked memos, seen by WIPR, EPO officials have been instructed to hold regular discussions with some of the biggest filers at the office as part of a pilot scheme. The memos were circulated in February and April, but have only now emerged.
Among the ten applicants included in the pilot scheme are allegedly Samsung, Siemens, Canon and Microsoft, which ranked first, second, 22nd and 28th for the number of applications filed at the office in 2013.
The scheme is running between April 2015 and April 2016. At the end of the trial run, management at the EPO will assess whether to expand the number of applicants in the programme and introduce it as permanent policy.
The memos, which the EPO has confirmed are authentic, stated that the pilot scheme is intended to attract big companies to apply for patents at the EPO rather than rival intellectual property offices by offering an improved service.
According to the memos, the idea for the scheme was prompted by alleged complaints by both Microsoft and Canon that a number of their applications had been excessively delayed.
“We should foster a better esprit de service, not least to ensure that we do not lose workload market share to other major offices,” the memos said.
Florian Müller, author of the FOSS Patents blog, said the memos are “ incontrovertible evidence of the EPO’s institutionalised unfairness”. Roy Schestowitz, author of the Techrights blog, said they show that the EPO is acting like a business.
However, a spokesperson for the EPO said the scheme is not about showing “favouritism” to big companies, but rather enabling a “better dialogue with applicants”.
The EPO offers an accelerated examination service (RAEX) to all applicants. The spokesperson said the pilot scheme will prevent big applicants from taking up all the RAEX resources because a big company can instead ask examiners to conduct a prior art search for an urgent application and ask them to delay the examination of a less important application.
The EPO spokesperson said the net effect is that smaller applicants will benefit because RAEX will not be flooded with requests from the biggest filers.
“Often applicants told us that a high quality and timely search was much more valuable to them than the examination rounds and subsequent grant two to three years later. We thought it would be a good idea to dedicate more staff resources to issuing timely searches,” the spokesperson said.
