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16 March 2018Patents

Patent quality endangered by EPO management, claim examiners

A petition submitted by 924 patent examiners has claimed that the quality of the European Patent Office (EPO) patent is endangered by the demands of current management.

The petition was sent as a letter to the Administrative Council (AC), the EPO’s supervisory body, ahead of its meeting later this month.

“We are far too often put in front of the dilemma of either working according to the European Patent Convention and respecting the examiner’s guidelines, or issuing ‘products’ as our hierarchy demands,” said the petition.

The EPO examiners added that the timeliness and number of “products” shouldn’t be the only criteria to assess the EPO’s and examiners’ performance, “but that attention should be paid to providing a high level of presumption of validity to the patents we grant”.

Just last week, the EPO released its annual report. At the time, EPO president Benoît Battistelli said that 2017 was a “positive year” for patents in Europe and that the “growing demand for European patents confirms Europe’s attractiveness as a leading technology market”.

WIPR has also seen an open letter from the Central Staff Committee (CSC), which was sent to Battistelli and vice president Alberto Casado Cerviño, who heads up the patent granting process.

The CSC said it has “observed with astonishment” that an “enormous unexplained increase of another 20% of the overall production objectives has been cascaded down to the directorates, teams and examiners”.

According to the letter, the automation tools developed at the EPO do not deliver the expected automatic searches and the examination of patent applications hasn’t become any easier or less time consuming than some years ago.

“Therefore, the only way to achieve such objectives will be, for most of the examiners affected, to spend much less time for each single patent application,” claimed the letter.

It added: “Ultimately, the responsibility for such poorly searched and examined patents cannot be attributed to the examiners any longer.”

The AC is also set to deliberate an employment proposal put forward by Battistelli to recruit staff on renewable contracts of five years during its meeting in Munich on March 21 and 22.

A controversial term in the proposal was dropped in early March. Battistelli said he understood that the article had caused a great deal of concern among staff members, which is why he convinced the AC board to abandon it.

WIPR has reached out to the EPO and the story will be updated if we receive comment.

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