In 2018, businesses and inventors continued to file large numbers of patent applications at the EPO, with the five top filing regions - Europe, the US, Japan, China and the Republic of Korea - all showing increases. Companies from the EPO member states filed 3.8% more European patent applications in 2018,...
The number of patent applications filed with the European Patent Office (EPO) grew by 4.6% last year, reaching a new high of 174 317 (2017: 166 594). The EPO's Annual Report for 2018 shows an increase in patents filed from all major industrial regions but European companies maintained the lead...
As a follow-up to its "Patenting Blockchain" conference, the European Patent Office (EPO) has published a conference report entitled "Talking about a new revolution: blockchain" to provide insight into the impact of this technology on the patent system. Held at the EPO in The Hague in December last year - the...
A study published today, 6 November 2018, by the European Patent Office (EPO) reveals that innovation in self-driving vehicles (SDV) is accelerating fast and finds that patent protection strategies in the area of self-driving vehicle technology more closely resemble those in the information and communication (ICT) sector than those in...
Forty years ago, on 20th of December the EPO published its first European patent application, EP 0 000 001. Filed by the European Atomic Energy Community, the application related to a "thermal heat pump". The corresponding European patent was granted on 7 January 1981. EP 0 000 001 was only one...