The European Patent Office (EPO) and the State Intellectual Property Office of the People’s Republic of China (SIPO) today announced the launch of a new EPO service, called the Global Dossier, that displays European and Chinese dossier content on a family of patent applications (applications for the same invention filed at multiple offices).
“The launch of the EPO’s Global Dossier service is a major step forward in efforts to provide users with a single point of access to information on how their applications are progressing at different patent offices around the world,” said EPO President Benoît Battistelli. “This should help them to manage their related applications more efficiently, bringing time and cost savings. I am very pleased that the EPO and SIPO are at the forefront of this initiative, which is a fruit of our strategic partnership.”
“Patent procedures of patent families can now be accessed in a more user-friendly way, which has been repeatedly requested by industry,” said SIPO Commissioner Dr Shen Changyu. “It is satisfying to see that IP stakeholders can benefit directly from co-operation between SIPO and the EPO.”
The Global Dossier builds on the groundwork of the IP5 offices – a forum for co-operation among the patent offices of China, Japan, Korea, the US and the EPO aimed at modernising the global patent system. The service uses an IP5-agreed standard to retrieve on demand, via the European Patent Register, SIPO file-wrapper content for Chinese applications also filed at the EPO. It performs an automatic machine translation when Chinese documents are requested in English.
Other IP5 offices will soon start providing data for the service, which will further enhance its value.
More information at EPO
