New EPO study released: “Standards and the European Patent System”

The EPO have today released a study entitled “Standards and the European patent system” which can be accessed here. The study explores the interplay between patents and technical standards, particularly focusing on Standard Essential Patents (SEPs) and their litigation within Europe.

Some of the key findings include:

• The EPO has a prior art collection of over 5 million standards-related documents. 
• The integration of standards development organisation (SDO) databases into the patent grant process has led to a steady rise in examiner citations of these documents. In technology areas with intense standardisation activity, over 30% of search reports involve SDO-related dossiers.
• Examiner citations of documents in the SDO databases establish a natural link between standards and patent applications.
• There is considerable overlap between the presence and number of citations of SDO documents and the likelihood of a patent being declared a SEP.
• The Unified Patent Court has established itself as an important venue in SEP litigation.

Marks & Clerk patent attorneys and lawyers have extensive experience in the area of SEPs, having been responsible for filing and prosecuting patent applications covering many different standardised technologies. We look forward to delving into the study in more detail.

The EPO study, titled Standards and the European patent system, introduces a new dataset that reveals with greater clarity than ever before how standards documentation is used in the examination of European patent applications, and also how often the resulting patents go on to be declared essential to widely adopted technology standards

www.epo.org/...