Following a tradition initiated by the USPTO when it organised the first yearly IP5 meeting in 2007 in Hawaii, I had the pleasure to welcome my colleagues last week on [...]
Last week, the EPO’s Economic and Scientific Advisory Board (ESAB), which was set up in January, held its two first workshops in Munich. They brought together some 40 participants from [...]
It was my great pleasure to welcome WIPO Director General Francis Gurry to Munich last Thursday for the signing of a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) between our two institutions. In [...]
Within the group of BRICS countries, Brazil offers both a dynamic economy and attractive new market opportunities. Positive developments are also apparent in intellectual property, where national patent filings have [...]
Back in January, we published a general summary of our preliminary filing figures for 2011. We have now consolidated those figures, giving us a more detailed picture of last year’s [...]
Yesterday was D-day for the EPO’s latest patent information service – Patent Translate. When we signed our machine-translation (MT) partnership with Google less than a year ago, we were all [...]
Following on from the first agreement on our machine translation programme, reached in November 2011 with the Chinese Patent Office (SIPO), this week in Tokyo I was very pleased to [...]
Last week, I had the pleasure of taking part in the first meeting of the EPO’s Economic and Scientific Advisory Board (ESAB). This new body is made up of eleven [...]
On Tuesday, we published our preliminary figures for patent filings received in 2011. They reached a new peak of 243 000, up 3% on the 2010 figure (235 000), which [...]
As the year draws to a close, I would like to take this opportunity to review our main achievements. The EPO did well in 2011, despite Europe’s economic difficulties. We [...]
