Over 30 years mutual cooperation, the Chinese Patent Office and European Patent Office devoted to improve the patent quality and coordinate their local patent system together. According to a statistic compared with that of 2018, applicants from European countries filed 42 thousand patent applications in China, an increase of 4.9% in 2019, while the number of applications from China accepted by the European Patent Office increased by about 30% in 2019.
IP-intensive industries account for more in GDP of the two regions, and gradually play an important role in economics of both regions, thus it becomes more important for all of us to ensure the continuity of IP development. During the COVID-19 period, the Chinese Patent Office and the European Patent Office took a lot of new measures to ensure that people from all the countries can get IP protection smoothly in Europe and China. Specifically, the CNIPA promulgates a series of rules, such as allowing some overdue IP rights to be restored, reducing the requirements of filing materials, and deducting the surcharges of patent annuities. At the same time, the EUIPO allows extension of some time limits, online meeting for oral hearing and the like. Both of the two patent offices are ready to do their parts to get through the difficult time. The CNIPA opened their patent search and analysis system, providing rich resources such as drug-related search and patent analysis. The EUIPO also opened their Espacenet public database, which contains more than 110 million global patent literature data. All the measures of the two patent offices are providing a high flexibility for all the users when they arrange their IP plans.
No matter during this COVID-19 period or post-pandemic period, the CNIPA and the EUIPO will jointly work to offer consecutive IP supports for all the users on the basis of long-term, friendly and active cooperation.
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