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On the occasion of a visit to the European Patent Office (EPO) in Munich by Grigory Petrovich Ivliev, Director General of Rospatent, the two institutions have committed to further strengthen their co-operation.
Rospatent and the EPO signed a Biennial Cooperation Plan, which includes harmonisation of legal and administrative frameworks; sharing information on the IT used to develop search tools and statistics; improvements in data exchange; staff training; public outreach activities to promote the patent system to Russian businesses and promoting the Cooperative Patent Classification (CPC).
President of the EPO Benoît Battistelli said “The biennial working plan that we have signed today with Rospatent gives us a strong framework on which to further build our cooperation. We have agreed on two main priorities: CPC implementation and automated enriched data exchange. I am also delighted that our offices have agreed to the signing of a PPH agreement in the near future.”
Director General Ivliev underlined “This is the most comprehensive cooperation programme that we have with any patent office. For over twenty years our two offices have worked together and our continuing cooperation is now more assured than ever.”
The meeting laid the foundation for a Memorandum of Understanding to be concluded imminently on a bilateral Patent Prosecution Highway (PPH) agreement. Such an agreement will facilitate faster processing of patent applications between the two offices, with each benefiting from work done by the other and reducing duplication of effort.
Rospatent and the EPO have a proud and productive history of co-operation going back over a quarter of a century. In recent years Rospatent has adopted the CPC – the new benchmark in a refined patent classification, and Russian has been included in the EPO’s public Patent Translate tool since 2013.
President Battistelli also took the opportunity to congratulate and encourage Mr Ivliev in pursuing ISO9001 accreditation for the quality management systems at Rospatent, in much the same way that the EPO has done over the last two years.
