The Sun and its planets: The European Patent Office and national offices

Abstract

Europe's national patent offices In Europe, the early decades of the twentieth century were a period of consolidation and growth of national patent offices. European offices developed their own approaches to the regulation of the patent grant. A proposal put to a UK Parliamentary Committee of 1931 that examiners should more deeply investigate the invention before grant, including its practicability, was rejected by that committee on the basis that it was better to have a scheme that ensured that patents were granted cheaply so as to favour the ‘poor inventor’. The higher standard approach to patent examination in Germany and the Netherlands in which patent examiners had the power to demand evidence of the invention's practicability was rejected. The same UK Committee also considered whether the UK should follow the US and Germany down the path of increasing the scope of the search of the prior art when it came to assessing novelty. Under UK law, the examiner essentially had to search only published British patent specifications. In Germany and the US, foreign specifications and other sources of published technical information formed part of the prior art base that examiners had to search. Investing heavily in extending the searches by examiners was rejected by the UK committee on the basis of its expense. The Committee took the view that the UK patent office should make some return to state revenues rather than reinvesting surpluses for the purpose of improving its service.