Updating an international treaty is not a short-term exercise but, in
reality, starts the very next day after a diplomatic conference has adopted the
treaty for the first time. Over the years, since the conclusion of the EPC in
1973, a number of deficiencies and weaknesses as well as many proposals for
improvement had been noted. Towards the end of the 1990s, time was ripe for the
first comprehensive revision of the EPC, and in 1998 the Administrative Council
of the European Patent Organisation agreed on a catalogue of legal and technical
points for revision.
The aims of the revision were the following:
- First of all, it was indispensable to take into account developments in
international law, in particular the TRIPs Agreement and the Patent Law Treaty
2000.
- The second aim was to satisfy the justified needs and expectations of the
user community, for instance by establishing a new centralised limitation
procedure before the EPO and making possible a limited judicial review of Boards
of Appeal decisions.
- Thirdly, the EPO had to meet its own demands in view of the workload, inter
alia by enabling the EPO to introduce Office-wide the BEST system (Bringing
Search and Examination Together).
- Fourthly, there was a general interest in eliminating unnecessary
requirements (deregulation).
- Finally, the EPC had to be made more adaptable by streamlining the articles
of the EPC itself, transferring many details of a procedural or administrative
character to the Implementing Regulations.
The detailed proposals for revision of the EPC were prepared by a Task Force
comprising members from all EPO departments and were subject of a broad-based
consultation, not least of the user community through the channels of the
Standing Advisory Committee before the EPO (SACEPO). All proposals were then
thoroughly examined and refined in a number of meetings of the Organisation’s
Committee on Patent Law comprising experts from all Contracting States, observer
countries and organisations.
Conference Results
The outcome of this intensive preparatory work was nearly one hundred
proposals for changes to the EPC, collected in a Basic Proposal for the Revision
of the EPC, approved by the Administrative Council in September 2000 and
submitted to the Conference of the Contracting States convened under Article
172 EPC and held in Munich from 20 to 29 November 2000:
- Basic proposal for the revision of the EPC (MR/2/00 , dated 13.10.2000, PDF 396
KB)
The Conference of the Contracting States took place from 20 to 29 November
2000. At the press conference held at the end of the Conference, Mr
Grossenbacher, President of the Conference, gave the following account:
-
Statement
by the President of the Diplomatic Conference dated 29.11.2000
At the end of the Conference the representatives of the Contracting States
signed the Final
act of the Conference in which they declare to have drawn up and adopted the
text of
A full account of the work of the Diplomatic Conference can be found in the
Conference
proceedings (PDF 1.9 MB).
