Unified Prosecution Phase
The Convention also includes provisions setting out filing requirements of European applications, the procedure up to grant, the opposition procedure and other aspects relating to the prosecution of patent applications under the Convention.
European patent applications may be filed in any official language of an EPC contracting state (subject to certain requirements), but patent applications are prosecuted in the three official languages of the EPO - English, French and German (if an application is filed in a language other than the official languages, a translation must be filed into one of the three. The filing fee is reduced to offset the additional cost of the translation). The official language of filing (or of the translation) is adopted as the "language of proceedings" and is used by the EPO for communications.
European patent applications are prosecuted in a similar fashion to most patent systems - the invention is searched and published, and subsequently examined for compliance with the requirements of the EPC.
During the prosecution phase, a European patent is a single regional proceeding, and "the grant of a European patent may be requested for one or more of the Contracting States." An applicant for a European patent designates those Contracting States in which protection for the invention is desired, and the designations need to be "confirmed" later during the procedure through the payment of designation fees. Once granted by the EPO, a European patent comes into existence effectively as a group of national patents in each of the designated Contracting States.
Read more about this topic: European Patent Convention
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