Russia and EPO announce patent collaborations
The European Patent Office (EPO) has announced the start of two joint initiatives with Russia and The Eurasian Patent Office.
Meeting in Geneva, on September 26, the heads of the EPO, the Intellectual Property of the Russian Federation (Rospatent) and the Eurasian Patent Office (EAPO) launched the Russian-English component of the EPO’s Patent Translate service.
The service, which translates patent documents from a variety of languages, will make more than 1.5 million Russian documents available in English on the EPO’s patent database Espacenet.
"These initiatives are major steps forward in improving access to information on new technologies and harmonising our patent systems, which will boost innovation in Europe and beyond," said EPO President Benoît Battistelli.
Patent Translate, which was launched in 2012, now enables the translation of patents from and into English for 22 languages, including Chinese and Japanese.
Rospatent has also agreed to begin classifying its published patent applications into the Cooperative Patent Classification (CPC) used at the EPO.
The CPC is a classification system for patent documents and was jointly implemented by the EPO and the United States Patent and Trademark Office in January this year.
It is used by more than 45 patent offices worldwide as a means to perform efficient prior art searches during the patent granting process.
Rospatent director-general Boris Simonov said the introduction of CPC was another step towards a “harmonised and more effective patent system.”
“We believe that the ultimate goal of such co-operation is the development of high-quality patent examination practices for the benefit of the global IP community," Simonov said.
