一覧に戻る German Patent Law

As of April 1, 2014 the German Patent Law has been amended. Summarizing the amendments it can be said that the German Patent Laws has been harmonized with regulations found in other European Patent Laws, particularly the European Patent Convention (EPC).

In particular, the period for filing an opposition after grant of a patent has been prolonged from three months to nine months, thus being brought into line with the opposition period in the EPC. The oral proceedings during an opposition held in Germany will now be public.

Further, the German Patent Office will now provide online file inspection for German patent applications under www.register.dpma.de. This applies to all applications, wherein file inspection is available to the public, which is generally the case for all published applications. 

Another change of the law which is in favour of applicants is the fact that oral proceedings are now carried out during examination proceedings if the applicant requests oral proceedings and a patent cannot be granted in written proceedings. Before this change of the German Patent Law it was within the discretion of the examiner handling the application to hold oral proceedings. If the examiner did not consider oral proceedings to be appropriate, no oral proceedings were held, even if requested by the applicant, and the application was refused in writing.

The biggest advantage for applicants which prefer to draft and file an application in the English or French language is that now applications can be filed in English and French. In such a case a translation into German has to be filed within 12 months after the filing date if no priority is claimed or within 15 months of the priority date if the application claims a priority. This means that if a first filing is done at the German Patent Office in English or French and a request for search is filed at the time of filing the application, the prior art search by the German Patent Office will be carried out on the basis of the English or French application text. We confirmed this in a telephone conversation with the German Patent Office. 

Since the German Patent Office has a policy of issuing a search report within the priority year for a first filing, this means that the applicant will receive a search report from the German Patent Office without the need to file any translation into the German language. As another advantage, to the recent changes to the German Patent Law, the German Patent Office will not only provide a search report but also a short opinion on the patentability of the claimed subject matter. The search result can be taken into account for later filing strategy, and a later application claiming priority of this first filing can be filed at any patent office which accepts the English or French language without the need of preparing any translation into German. When looking at the fact that the search fee of 300 Euro at the German Patent Office is significantly lower than the search fee at many other patent offices, this option seems to be of great advantage for clients who prefer to use the English or French language.

Should you have any questions, please feel free to contact lenhard@mueller-bore.de 

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