In 2007, the EPO received a record number of patent applications, but the number of patents granted by the Office fell by almost 13% over the same period.
The EPO said that the trend suggests the Office is putting "quality before quantity".
In a statement, EPO president Alison Brimelow said: "The purpose of patents is to support the generation of economic benefits for society. However, large patent numbers are not necessarily indicative of growing R&D activity. What we therefore need is not more patents, but more better patents. The EPO aims to make sure that the patents it grants are relevant. The lower number of patents published in 2007 reflects this priority and is a step in the right direction."
Last year the Office received around 218,200 patent filings, compared to 210,600 in the previous year. But examiners granted just 54,700 patents – 8,100 less than in 2006.
Applications from the EPO’s 32 member states continue to account for just less than half of the Office’s total patent filings. Germany last year maintained its dominant position as the biggest European filer at the EPO, filing 17.9% of the Office’s total applications. It was followed by France with 5.9% and the Netherlands with 5%.
Outside of Europe, applicants from the US filed the largest number of applications at the EPO last year (more than a quarter of the EPO’s total), while Japanese applicants filed 22,890 applications, or 16.3%.
Although the total number of applications from China remains relatively low, they are growing rapidly. Chinese applicants filed 1,145 European patent applications last year, up 59% on 2006.
The most active filing areas at the EPO are medical technology (12% of the total of applications), electric communications technique (10.2%) and computing (6.4%). But the fastest growth rates were seen in the fields of engineering elements, electric communications technique, medical technology and organic chemistry. Fewer patents were filed last year in the areas of computing and information storage.
Last month, the EPO announced that it would team up with the USPTO to set up a project similar to a patent prosecution highway (PPH), in an effort to speed up the processing of applications at the two IP offices and to tackle patent backlogs.
Bilateral PPH programmes are designed to allow applicants who have received an examination report from one office to request accelerated examination of a corresponding patent application filed in the other country.
The April issue of Managing IP includes an article that considers the benefits of the PPH system to both applicants and IP offices. You can read it here.
