WIPR survey: EPO patent quality is endangered, claim readers

WIPR readers believe that the quality of the European Patent Office (EPO) patent is endangered by the demands of current management, according to our latest survey.

On March 16, WIPR  reported that 924 patent examiners at the EPO sent a petition to the Administrative Council, which supervises the EPO, ahead of its annual meeting this month. The petition said that patent quality is being jeopardised by the demands of the EPO’s leadership.

WIPR also reported on an open letter from the EPO’s Central Staff Committee which claimed that 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.

The latest WIPR survey found that just 10% of WIPR readers disagreed with the claims made in the examiners’ petition.

A number of readers said that EPO examiners are working under a heightened amount of pressure to ensure they deliver results within tight time constraints.

One person explained that current targets are “going to lead to a less thorough review of cases”, and another said that the pressure on EPO examiners leads to a “serious lack of quality in examinations”.

“Arbitrarily and annually increasing targets for increased ‘production’ can only reduce quality,” explained one reader. They predicted that “if things continue as they are going, the European patent system will die and people will revert to national filings”.

“The current management only seems to care about statistics” rather than the quality of the patents being granted, one reader claimed.

In their petition, the EPO examiners said 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”.

According to one reader, some examiners are scheduled for oral hearings “every week”, which is “impossible to manage”.

Very few readers who disagreed with the petition sought to explain their views. One said that the EPO is the “most expensive IP office in the world” and it has very high management standards, along with high search and examination standards.

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