Your source of information on patenting issues in the news.
The European Union has been working on the creation of an EU patent for many years. The latest approach - "enhanced co-operation" - aims at establishing unitary patent protection for the territories of the 25 EU member states currently taking part in this scheme.
While some countries grant patents for software - a hotly debated topic - the practice in Europe is different. To get a European patent for a computer-implemented invention (CII), inventors need to show that their invention actually makes a contribution in a technical field.
Here we look at current issues in patent classification, including efforts to harmonise classification systems and the tagging schemes developed by the EPO to identify technologies that span multiple technical fields.
As part of a three-year project, the EPO interviewed over 100 key players in the fields of science, business, politics, ethics, economics and law, seeking their opinions on the key factors and challenges likely to have an impact on patenting and IP in the future. The result: four challenging, relevant and plausible scenarios describing four possible future worlds.
Biotechnology has consistently ranked among the ten largest technical fields at the EPO in the last few years, yet the professional and public debate about the patentability of biotechnological inventions continues.
