EPO leads debate on patents and climate change

01 February 2010

After the confusion in Copenhagen, the EPO is injecting hard facts about the role of patents in fighting climate change. Emma Barraclough reports

Green patents, eco patents, clean tech: IP professionals will have heard these phrases from politicians, business leaders and environmental campaigners. But how many know what the terms really mean?

Last year, officials at the European Patent Office decided to add some data to an increasingly data-free debate about the role of IP in mitigating the effects of climate change. Much of the impetus came from staff involved with the Office's Scenarios for the Future project, launched in 2004 to consider what the global patent system might look like in 20 years' time. Although officials were sure that patents are needed to incentivise innovators, questions remained about the role of IP when it came to the diffusion and accessibility of the protected technology.

With the patent system increasingly under attack by environmental campaigners who called for existing patents over so-called green technology to be broken – and for such innovations to...

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