EPO’s President Benoit Battistelli has tabled proposals to cut several fees related to the European Patent application procedure: if approved, they could save users almost 50 mln euros in 2018 alone.

A series of “ground-breaking proposals” to lower the cost of European patents were announced by the President of the European Patent Office Benoit Battistelli in a blog post at the end of October.

If the proposals were adopted, the good news for European patent users would be first of all that the inflation-based biennial fee adjustment for 2018-2020 would not be applied.

Secondly, both the search fee and the examination fee charged by the EPO for PCT applications would be cut by 100 euros.

European examination fees for files already examined by the EPO in PCT proceedings would be discounted by 75% (up from the current 50% discount). For applicants using the EPO as an International Search Authority for search and examination and entering the European phase, the new proposal would cut costs by 14%.

Moreover, the EPO would reduce by around 7% the fees paid by eight states (e.g. France and Italy) for the search reports with written opinion issued for national patent applications.

Mr Battistelli estimates that all the above measures combined would save EPO users almost 50 million euros in 2018 alone, although it is not clear which categories of users would benefit the most from the supposed savings.

Will the proposals become final? That will be known only in December 2017, after the European Patent Organization member states’ vote on adoption.