PRESS RELEASE

"Machine translation adds value to patent information"

Lausanne, 19 October 2010 - Exploiting the advantages of patent information to support innovation in Europe and internationally is the focus of the 20th Patent Information Conference hosted by the European Patent Office (EPO) in Lausanne, Switzerland. Nearly 350 delegates from 40 countries are attending to exchange views on how to further improve access to this important resource. The EPO Patent Information Conference continues until 21 October.

"Patent information is a cornerstone of the innovation system and of strategic importance to both patent offices and industry across the world," said Benoît Battistelli, President of the EPO, in his opening address. "It is also a key to accessing technical knowledge developed by the rapidly growing economies in the world and so provides an important instrument for safeguarding the quality of patents in Europe."

With over one million patent applications filed annually around the globe, delegates agreed that patents were clearly the preferred way for innovators to protect their inventions. They questioned, however, whether patents fulfil their function as teaching documents, despite their widespread availability online via services such as the EPO's esp@cenet service (www.espacenet.com). With more than 70 million documents from all fields of technology, the EPO has the world's most comprehensive free public database on applied technology. esp@cenet is queried by over 25 000 users per day. Responding to concerns that the legal nature of patents makes it difficult for engineers and scientists to retrieve the documents, the EPO has started to simplify access to patent information in specific sectors such as clean energy technologies and nanotechnology.

The EPO President said that accessing and understanding these patents is a key issue for innovators, particularly in view of the growing importance of the question of language of patents. "We need to profit from the opportunities today's technology provides," he said, "and put machine translation solutions into place that allow technically qualified people to read patent documents, regardless of their geographical and technical origin." More than 700 000 machine translations have been requested for documents on esp@cenet since January 2010.

The EPO will be studying the results of the conference and looking at ways of working together with the national patent offices of its member states to improve the use of patents as an information tool for European industry.