“It's not sensible to give incentives to users by lowering the entry fees into the system. We are not selling patents – we don’t need a campaign. We should stop spreading this message that bigger numbers are good,” said Grossenbacher in an exclusive interview published in the February issue of Managing IP.
Grossenbacher, who is director of the Federal Institute for Intellectual Property in Switzerland, has been chair of the EPO’s Administrative Council since 2000.
He told Managing IP he advocated a shift from annuities to procedural fees: “Patent fees should never have a fiscal character. They should be cost-covering. They should not be structured to attract more applications. We should be critical of the idea of an incentive to step into the system: it could be a mis-incentive – pushing a small company into error by joining the patent system with poor inventions, leading it to lose money.”
He added that he doubted that small increases would disincentivize applicants, as official fees only make up a small part of the costs of applications, compared to attorneys’ fees and translation costs.
Like many patent offices, the EPO has seen enormous growth in recent decades. The number of applications has quadrupled in the past 25 years, to reach 208,500 in 2006.
Many of the new applications are coming from emerging markets such as China and are in cutting-edge technologies.
Grossenbacher said that, against this background, the Office’s financing has to be addressed: “We used to think we had long-term financial health. Now we know better. It is not a short-term problem but a long-term one, and we need to address the pension scheme, the conservative staff regulations and older hiring to dramatically reduce our liabilities.”
In December, the Administrative Council backed a five-point plan setting out how the EPO should tackle its growing workload. The study was prepared by Board 28, a group of member state representatives appointed by the Council.
One of the five points concerns the European Patent Network (EPN), whereby national offices share some of the EPO’s work.
Grossenbacher described the EPN as a “partnership approach” but added that the search and examination of European patent applications is still done at the EPO only, even though some member states favour moving more work to national offices. “The loaded question of outsourcing is excluded from the workload study. We have agreed to disagree on this within the Council.”
He also said that the EPO is “looking over the shoulders” of the other trilateral patent offices, in Japan and the US, as they cooperate on reducing duplication of examiners’ work.
But he added that the EPO would not rush to join the patent prosecution highway (PPH) established by the other two offices: “The big problem from a European viewpoint is that the Japanese and US backlogs are such that hardly any results from the USPTO or JPO are timely available for the EPO. We are not on an equal footing there.”
Grossenbacher expressed support for pan-European initiatives such as the London Agreement and Community patent, as well as attempts to simplify litigation in Europe, in the interview.
But he cautioned that the EPO, which has seven member states that are not members of the European Union, should not be subsumed into the EU: “Would the EU dominate the EPO? Would non-EU members be disadvantaged? Another consequence would be if the EPO became politicized. In such a situation, Switzerland might have to reconsider its position viz-a-viz the EPO.”
Managing IP’s February issue also includes the annual survey of the leading patent firms worldwide, as well as articles looking at the latest patent trends in the US, Africa, Europe and Asia. Information on subscribing is available at managingip.com or by calling +44 (0) 20 7779 8999.
