16 May 2012
The EPO and the Federal Service for Intellectual Property (Rospatent) have agreed to enhance co-operation in the promotion of innovation by enabling machine translation of patents from and into Russian. Under the Agreement signed in Moscow today, Rospatent and the EPO will exchange full-text versions of patent documents in Russian and English to create bilingual text corpora for use in the free Patent Translate service on the EPO's website.
"For the first time in the history of the European patent system Russian-language patents will be made available to the users This agreement breaks new ground in the relationship between the EPO and Russia," said EPO President Benoît Battistelli. "It will bring the wealth of technology contained in patents to the fingertips of innovators in both our regions, removing language as a delimiting factor," he said.
"The information function of patents cannot be rated high enough. Innovation is a global market, and by making their respective collections of patent documents accessible to researchers, scientists and inventors in Russian and English, the EPO and Rospatent significantly contribute to strengthening the innovation process both in their regions and at worldwide level. Especially small and medium-sized enterprises, as well as research institutions, stand to benefit from this improved access to information on new technologies," President Battistelli stated.
"This agreement will facilitate the filing of patent applications by Russian companies in the rest of Europe and by European companies in Russia," said Boris Simonov, Director General of Rospatent. "This in turn will lead to further innovation in our two regions."
The enhanced relationship between Russia and the EPO is reflected in the trends in recent filing figures. For example, applications filed by companies from EPO member states with the Russian patent office saw an increase by approximately 10% from 2010 to 2011. The number of applications filed by Russian inventors and companies at the EPO in 2011 was up 19% on the previous year.
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