The National Institute of Industrial Property (INPI) of Brazil and the European Patent Office (EPO) have signed a bilateral agreement aimed at enhancing co-operation between the two offices. The partnership will focus on sharing best practices in the patent grant procedure, capacity-building, patent information and IT solutions, including e-Patentes, which is built on EPO technology. The INPI and EPO will exchange patent documents in Portuguese and English to create bilingual text corpora for use in the free Patent Translate service on the EPO’s website. This will facilitate the filing of patent applications by Brazilian companies in Europe and by European companies in Brazil.
The agreement paves the way for a strategic relationship aimed at fostering the protection of intellectual property in the two regions. European companies are among the most active users of the patent system in Brazil, filing 38 % of all patent applications there. Applications filed, for example, by French companies with the Brazilian Office saw a 7.7 % increase between 2010 and 2011; those from German companies rose by 14 % in the same period. The number of applications filed by Brazilian inventors and companies in Europe in 2011 was 8.9 % up on the previous year.
- National Institute of Industrial Property (INPI), Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
- European Patent Office (EPO), Munich, Germany
