tirsdag den 3. april 2012

European patent Office - fee increase

The Administrative Council of the European Organization has decided to amend the Rules relating to its fees. It has been decided that as of 1st. of April 2012 the fees will increase between 5% to 10% and the new amounts will be binding in respect of payments made on or after this date.
Some of the most important fees are listed below.

European Patent Office Increases Fees

Filing fee (online): Increases from 105 EUR to 115 EUR
Search fee: Increases from 1105 EUR to 1165 EUR
Claims fee: Increases from 210 EUR to 225 EUR
Designation fee: Increases from 525 EUR to 555 EUR
Examination fee: Increases from 1480 EUR to 1555 EUR
Fee for grant: Increases from 830 EUR to 875 EUR
Renewal fee 3rd year: Increases from 420 EUR to 445 EUR
Renewal fee 4th year: Increases from 525 EUR to 555 EUR
Renewal fee 5th year: Increases from 735 EUR to 775 EUR
Renewal fee 6th year: Increases from 945 EUR to 995 EUR

fredag den 30. marts 2012

New EPO patent translation service

EPO has launched a new machine patent translation service called ”Patent Translate”. The translation service is specifically trained to handle elaborate patent vocabulary and grammar and in order to do this, it uses Google translate technology. It is now available in Espacenet,the European publication server as well as via Google Translate. The way the machine works is that it takes a statistical approach where it compares the source document sentence by sentence to millions of patent documents previously translated by humans and the final translation is based on this previous learning by the translation engine.

The machine translation should be able to give an idea of the content of any patent or patent-related document and this might help you to determine, whether you need to invest in a thorough human translation of the document.

At the moment this service enables translation to and from French, German, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese and Swedish. It thereby covers around 90 % of all patents issued in Europe. A next batch including Danish, Dutch, Finnish, Greek, Hungarian and Norwegian will be uploaded in 2013 and by the end of 2014 the translation service should be available in all 32 languages of the EPO. As almost 60% of all applications currently originate from non-EPO countries, the EPO are also working to provide machine translation services for other languages such as Chinese, Japanese, Korean and Russian.
In order to keep the machine up to date, the millions of documents that are every year added to the EPO's databases, will also be fed into the system and thus help to continually improve the engine.