growth
6 September 2013Patents

EPO reports patent growth in 2013

More European patents have been filed and granted in the first half of 2013 compared with the same time last year, the European Patent Office (EPO) has revealed.

In a blog post on September 2, EPO president Benoît Battistelli said filings are up five percent and granted patents up 11 percent.

While figures for six-month periods were not provided, the number of patents applied-for and in force at the end of last year was about 258,000 and 66,000, respectively.

Both figures were records at the EPO.

Battistelli, who said Patent Cooperation Treaty applications were the driving force behind this year’s increase in filed patents, went on to say that the first half of 2013 will be remembered for “a number of key steps along the way towards improving the global patent system”.

The first, he said, is the Cooperative Patent Classification, a global classification system for patent documents launched by the EPO and the US Patent and Trademark Office in January. Since then, it has been adopted by several other patent offices, including in China and South Korea.

“Other national offices will follow soon,” he said.

Battistelli added that the Patent Translate service, which can translate patent documents into 21 languages other than English, has added Chinese and Japanese in recent months, with Korean to “follow shortly”.

“In parallel, we have also enriched our prior-art collection with a great deal of additional data, especially from Asia; it now holds more than 80 million documents,” he said.

“These three elements – classification, machine translation and prior-art databases – are already integrated into the day-to-day management of our patent process. As a result, I believe that the EPO is currently making great progress in mastering the world’s prior art, especially Asia’s which, until recently, has been difficult to access.”

The influence of Asia on the European patent scene has been increasing in recent times. Last year, Samsung, based in South Korea, filed the most European patents (2,289). In the process, it became the first Asian company to top the EPO rankings.

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