Home -> Law Blog Directory -> Intellectual Property Law Blogs -> IPKat

Intellectual Property Law

: IPKat

EPC 2000: if you liked the Convention, you'll love the book ...

By Jeremy

The IPKat expresses his pleasure on getting hold of a copy of A Guide to the EPC 2000. This convenient guide, written by Nicholas Fox of patent attorneys Beresford & Co and published by the Chartered Institute of Patent Attorneys, is described as aiming to help practitioners find their way around the new law--a slightly strange premise since this upgraded and amended version of the European Patent Convention has been in our consciousness since the end of the last century. However, its implementation and coming into force arrived with flurry of activity that coincided with the London Agreement (also featured in this volume) and Nicholas Fox's book performs a valuable service in helping its readers find what they already know, check what they don't know and pinpoint what they ought to know.

The meat of the book is an extensively annotated and cross-referenced copy of the revised Convention and Implementing Regulations, as well as the Rules Relating to Fees, the Protocol on Jurisdiction and the London Agreement. Articles and their most relevant rules are printed together to enable them to be read in context. Practical commentaries -- neatly boxed so you won't mistake them for the provisions themselves -- highlight the major changes, illustrating how the articles and rules interact in practice. According to the blurb:

"The EPC 2000 is the first major revision of the European Patent Convention in over 30 years. It brings with it important new provisions for post-grant limitation and judicial review of Board of Appeal decisions. It also imports many minor revisions to the detailed procedures for obtaining and maintaining European patents. These include the liberalisation of the minimum requirements for obtaining a filing date, changes to the EPO language regime and the extension of the scope of further processing under Article 121 and re-establishment of rights under Article 122. Many procedural provisions have also been transferred from the EPC into the Implementing Regulations, which have been re-numbered".

Bibliographical details: hardback, xiii + 238 pages. Price £25 + postage and packaging (there is a further 10% discount if you're a CIPA member). ISBN 978-0-9039322-6-4. Rupture factor: low.

Click here to order. For extracts from the book and further details, click here.

Full post as published by IPKat on February 16, 2008 (boomark / email).