The London Agreement II

According to a press release of the EPO, the London Agreement enters into force on May 1, 2008. However, Austria has not ratified the agreement yet.

Article 1 (1) of the Agreement states, that each contracting party of the Agreement with German, English or French as official language waives the requirement of a translation. Even though the formal requirement of Rule 71 (3) EPC states that the claims still have to be filed and published in German, English and French, the filing of a translation of the description into an official language of the respective contracting party is not required anymore when the party has ratified the Agreement.

At the moment, the contracting states affected are Germany, Luxemburg, Monaco, Switzerland, Liechtenstein and the United Kingdom.

Although the official languages of Belgium, Ireland and Austria are either German, English or French, these countries have not yet ratified the Agreement. In order to obtain an European Patent in Austria, it is still required to file a German translation of the entire specification.

Article 1 (2) and (3) consider contracting parties neither having German, English nor French as official language. At the moment, these countries are Denmark, Iceland, Croatia, the Netherlands, Sweden and Slovenia. These contracting states may choose one of the languages German, English or French and waive the requirement of a translation of the patent specification into their official languages, if the European Patent was granted in their chosen language.

However, these states reserve the right to request a translation of the patent claims into their official language.

For instance, in Sweden it is only necessary that the description is available in English (Sweden has chosen English as tolerated language for the patent specification), the patent claims, however, have to be translated into Swedish.

It can be expected that for the validation of a European Patent in German in several contracting parties a complete translation of the description into English language will be required, even if the United Kingdom does not require a translation.

Therefore it is advantageous to find the mimimum of partial translations for the desired contracting states in order to reduce the translation costs.

One major advantage of the London Agreement is that especially small and medium sized enterprises using German language do not have additional costs when validating a European Patent for Germany, France and the United Kingdom.

According to Article 2, the owner of the patent has to provide a full translation of the patent specification at his own expense when taking legal actions, for instance filing infringement proceedings or during nullity proceedings.