I know that I am a little bit late with this particular piece of information but nevertheless I think that the new policy of the Administrative Council (AC) of the European Patent Organisation (EPOorg) to publish (some? most?) of their Official Documents is worth to be disseminated widely.

http://www.epo.org/about-us/organisation/documentation/ac-documents.html

In a move towards greater transparency, the European Patent Office is improving the access to the documents of the Administrative Council of the European Patent Organisation. Under this new policy, all public documents of the Administrative Council will be made available after each session and published on the EPO’s website. The documents of the October 2012 session are already accessible.

The Administrative Council is the European Patent Organisation’s governing body. Made up of delegations from the Organisation’s 38 Member States, it is responsible for mainly supervising the activities of the European Patent Office, the executive body of the Organisation.

It appears that non-public Documents are not only not published but also not mentioned on the website at all. It is not known to me which criteria are applied internally to identify public and non-public Council Documents.

The Administrative Council is one of the two organs of the European Patent Organisation, the other being the European Patent Office. The Council acts as the Office’s supervisory body and is composed of the representatives of the EPO member states.

Present Documents include (inter alia):

  • CA/D 17/12 Decision of the Administrative Council of 11 December 2012 on payment of a collective reward to staff of the European Patent Office in active service during 2011 (Payment of EUR 4000,– for for each full-time EPO staff member)
  • CA/98/12 Rev. 1 Collective reward for EPO staff
  • CA/106/12 SPLH – Exchange of views on the documents produced by the Tegernsee Experts Group (study on grace period, study on 18-month-publication, treatment of conflicting applications, study on prior user rights, next steps within the Tegensee Process, recommendation for publication)

 (Photo: EPO)

 
About The Author

Axel H. Horns

German & European Patent, Trade Mark & Design Attorney

One Response to At Last: Administrative Council of EPOorg Publishes Official Documents

  1. This is a very good improvement in knowing the trends of EPO and particulalrly the political pressures exercised on the decisions by each national country. Until now only rumors were availble on the positions of the different national patent offices in relation to decisions in the patent granting procedure. Now we can hope that we may have a clear image of our national patentoffices are dealing in the administrarive council which is important for some countries.