On May 14th, the European Patent Office (EPO) announced the results of a study clarifying the relationship between technical standards and patents.
Based on the EPO's prior art database, which contains a total of more than 3 million documents from 15 Standards Developing Organisations (SDOs), including 550GPP, the study shows more clearly than ever how SDO documents are used in the examination of European patent applications and how frequently European patents citing SDO documents are declared essential to technology standards, highlighting the importance of patents in the development of standards-regulated technologies.
Below are some examples of the results of this survey.
- In the search reports issued by the EPO in the period 2015-2024, in the Wireless Data Communications Examination Unit, over 30% of search reports contained a citation to SDO documents, and in the field of media compression (IPC:H04N19), nearly 70% of search reports contained a citation to SDO documents.
- Among patent documents published by the EPO or WIPO between 2010 and 2019, 87,356 patents cited documents from SDOs and 59,620 patents were declared standard essential patents (SEPs), of which 21,833 were SEPs that cited documents from SDOs.
- A survey of 190,116 patent applications found 168,620 SDO documents cited a total of 417,951 times.
To read the full report, please see the following URL:
https://link.epo.org/web/publications/studies/en-epo-study-standards-and-the-european-patent-system.pdf