The Eurasian Patent Office: Offering Substantial Savings

Published on 23 February 2017

Patent offices across the world can be broadly classified into two types, national patent offices and regional patent offices. A national patent office refers to the patent office existing within an individual country and is responsible for administrating the patent law within that country. A regional patent office, on the other hand, refers to a patent office that is jointly formed by several different countries within a particular geographical area. The European Patent Office is the most famous of the regional patent offices. However, there are also other regional patent offices, the Eurasian Patent Office (“EAPO”) being one of them.

The Eurasian Patent Convention, which was ratified in 1995 by nine signatories, led to the establishment of the EAPO in 1996 in Moscow, Russia. With the Republic of Moldova’s exit in 2012, there are currently eight member states: Armenia; Azerbaijan; Belarus; Kazakhstan; Kyrgyzstan; the Russian Federation; Tajikistan; and Turkmenistan. Applicants from more than 80 countries utilize the Eurasian patent system¹, which has granted 22,700 patents between 1996 and 2015².

Obtaining a Eurasian patent that is valid in several or all member states of the EAPO is cheaper than the “cumulative costs of obtaining national patents in the member states¹.” For instance, let us consider a 40-page PCT application with 15 claims (including three independent claims), five pages of drawings, and filed by a large entity. We will use the USPTO as the International Searching Authority (Chapter II Demand not filed), for this example, and file a National Phase application with the EAPO, with Belarus, Kazakhstan, and Russia being the target jurisdictions.

It costs an estimated $19,693 to file the National Phase application, get a patent registered, and maintain the granted patent through to expiry (Table 1). The estimated costs are inclusive of official fees, attorney charges, and translation costs.

On the other hand, it costs an estimated $11,500 (Table 2), $16,574 (Table 3), and $11,749 (Table 4) to obtain patents through the National Phase route in Belarus, Kazakhstan, and Russia, respectively, and maintain the granted patents through to expiry.

Thus, the cumulative costs for the jurisdictions of Belarus (BY), Kazakhstan (KZ), and Russia (RU) amount to $39,823, which is approximately 100% more than the costs of filing a Eurasian National Phase application that would be valid in all three jurisdictions (Figure 1)!

One of the reasons for the lower fees is a substantial reduction in the translation costs. The EAPO application involves translation into one language only, whereas separate translations are required into the official language of each country, in the case of the individual National Phase applications. Furthermore, translation is required in two different stages, both filing and prosecution. As a result, the total translation costs for the EAPO application amount to just $2,447, whereas the same for individual applications amounts to $12,064 (an approximately five-fold increase)!

Interested in getting similar estimates? The Global IP Estimator is Quantify IP’s flagship software that accurately estimates the patenting costs for a single patent family. The costs are estimated based on our meticulous research of patent legislations in 150+ jurisdictions. Specific stages of the patenting process (filing, examination, prosecution, grant, and maintenance) can be included or excluded from the estimates.

Want to know more? Visit www.QuantifyIP.com , email us at qipcontact@quantifyip.com, or call us at +1-808-891-0099.

Venkatesh Viswanath (Senior Analyst, Quantify IP) contributed to this article.

Exchange Rates Used:
1 US Dollar = 0.96 Euros, 60.96 Russian Rubles, and 333.48 Kazakhstan Tenge

1. http://www.eapo.org/en/feature.html;
2. http://documents.epo.org/projects/babylon/eponet.nsf/0/BB3248FC776D2A93C1257FD300318EC8/$File/
patent_information_news_0216_en.pdf;
The estimates are inclusive of:
3. The official fees for extra claims (over five claims in Eurasia and one independent claim in Belarus) and the translation costs; 4. The official fees for requesting the examination of extra claims (over two independent claims in Eurasia, over one independent claim and 10 dependent claims in Belarus; and over one independent claim in Russia); 5. The attorney charges for reporting office actions; preparing responses; and processing responses, in addition to the translation costs (10 pages per prosecution action); 6. The official fees for the publication of extra pages at the time of grant (over 35 in Eurasia); and 7. The translation costs
8. The number of prosecution actions is based on our research of average number of such actions in each jurisdiction (1.5 in Eurasia and Russia; two in Belarus; and 2.5 in Kazakhstan)