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Sunday, September 16, 2007

How To Survive When The EPO No Longer Accepts Paper?

"[...] The European Patent Office is pleased to invite you to its annual Online Services conference, which this year will take place in the beautiful Lake Como area, Italy, on 13 and 14 November.

The conference theme is 'End-to-end electronic processing - how to survive when the EPO no longer accepts paper'. This challenging topic, which will affect all players in the IP world, will no doubt lead to some lively and interesting debates and presentations! [...]"

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So, this informal indication appears to be more than explicit about what is to be expected from EPO in coming years concerning on-line filings policy. Of course, up to now - at least as far as I know - there is no publication of any particular law in the making that would ban paper-based applications.

However, paper-based filing is mentioned merely in the

Implementation Regulations of EPC 2000, namely in

Rule 49 thereof. And, the Implementation Regulations

can easily be amended by the Administrative Council without need for a

Diplomatic Conference. Provided that there is a sufficient political desire in the Administrative Council, paper-based filings can be made history with little formal effort.

In selecting this topic as guiding theme of the Epoline Annual Conference, the EPO wants to tune in patent applicants as well as their representatives to the ambitious goals of making the entire EPO process a paperless undertaking. Should such a step be bemoaned or be combat? I think: not in general. Converting public administration bodies to electronic communication is surely to be seen as adequate in the internet age.

Nonetheless there is a darker side of EPO's ambition. In my view it is to be expected that EPO will show some tendency to solve its own problems in an unilateral approach which might be, if deemed necessary by EPO, well at the applicant's (or their representatives) expenses. I am quite afraid that the migration path to the paperless EPO as to be touted in Como later this year will also show a tendency towards a unilateralism when it comes to setting of technical standards by the epoline team. In view of the gory technical details thereof perhaps also

epi might not be willing or even able to produce a viable and thorough review. One of the points is that EPO traditionally has served the quasi-monopoly of Microsoft Windows on desktop computers by designing epoline software strictly based on product lines of Microsoft. To the contrary, for example the German Patent and Trade Mark Office has taken

a more open approach by writing a lot of software in Java which can be made quite easily

more platform-independent. Any unilateral approach of the EPO strictly excluding each and every usage of non-Microsoft based software by applicants and/or their representative within the context of epoline and electronic filing might well have a significant potential to curb innovative approaches of implementing case management software apart from the mainstream.

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