Innovation Europe > News > Innovation EU Vol1-1 > Protecting your interests

Europe is home to high-tech developments that have advanced progress, spurred economic growth and propelled it to prosperity. At the heart of this success is a solid system of patent protection: from improved mobility and communication devices to life-saving medicines and environmentally friendly technologies, many important inventions might not have seen the light of day without the European patent system.

Patents give inventors the exclusive right to prevent others from exploiting their invention for a limited time in exchange for disclosing the details of the invention. This serves as a strong incentive to innovate.

Roots in Europe

The patent system has come a long way since the first patent law was passed by the city of Venice in 1474 to protect the interests of inventors by assuring them the right to their inventions and prohibiting unauthorised copying. In 1624, the Statute of Monopolies was enacted in England, which allowed patents to be granted for a limited period to the “true and first inventor”.

Other important conventions and treaties followed in the 19th century as more national patent laws were enacted. The setting up of the International Patent Institute (IIB) in The Hague in 1947 as a common resource for patent searching and archiving ushered in a European approach to patents.

Recognising the need for closer co-operation on patent protection, 16 countries signed the European Patent Convention (EPC) in 1973, setting up an international organisation, the European Patent Organisation, with its executive body, the European Patent Office (EPO). Today,, the Organisation has 36 member states and three associated states. With nearly 7,000 staff, the Office is the second-largest European organisation after the European Commission. The EPO has its headquarters in Munich with offices in The Hague, Berlin, Vienna and Brussels.

The grant procedure

The EPO examines patent applications in all fields of technology, applying a centralised and uniform grant procedure. Today it is possible to obtain patent protection in up to 39 European countries (reaching a market of about 570 million people) on the basis of a single application in one of the EPO’s three official languages (English, French and German). This makes it the largest transnational patent system in the world.

Since no unitary EU-wide patent yet exists, patent applicants need to select the countries in which they would like protection. The patent granted by the EPO has the same legal effects as a national patent does in each of these countries. It is generally more economic to file a European patent application rather than national ones when protection is sought for at least four European countries.

Under the EPC, patents are only granted for inventions that are new (not known to the public in any form), involve an inventive step (not obvious to a skilled person) and are industrially applicable (can be manufactured or used industrially). The EPO’s examination procedure serves to establish that these criteria are fulfilled and that a patent may be granted. While the patent system is generally open to all technologies, there are a number of exceptions to patentability under the EPC, such as scientific discoveries, mathematical formulae, aesthetic creations and methods of doing business, to name a few. Other restrictions are found in the area of biotechnology.

The benefits of patents

A growing number of individual inventors and businesses – both SMEs and large companies – are realising the commercial impact of patenting their inventions. Patents give companies the possibility to reap the rewards of their investment and recoup development costs. They have also become an important tool for measuring a company’s R&D performance, as well as a trading and bargaining chip for cross-licensing and technology alliances. And many companies now consider it important to have a large patent portfSolio to be recognised as a serious business partner and raise capital.

Patents are increasingly of interest to academia. More and more public research institutions and universities are now patenting their inventions. Research institutions can start a company to commercialise their patent, or have it licensed by others, which in turn funds university research and opens up new possibilities for innovation.

Patents also have an important knowledge transfer function. In return for patent protection, the inventor has to disclose the details of the invention, which are published in the patent document. A large proportion of the world’s applied technical knowledge can therefore be found in patent documents. The availability of this information inspires further inventions and at the same time helps prevent the duplication of R&D work.

The world’s largest database of patent information, esp@cenet, launched jointly by the EPO and European Commission in 1998, contains over 64 million patent documents from around the globe, and is available via the internet free of charge.