Technology standards and patents for Europe’s digital future​

Today, the European Patent Office (EPO) published a study that reveals the clear link between technology standards and patents. The study leverages the EPO’s vast prior art databases, which include over 5.5 million documents from standards development organisations (SDOs), a unique collection curated through close collaboration over the past two decades.​ The study also analyses recent European case law on Standard Essential Patents (SEPs).  
The EPO study, titled Standards and the European patent system, introduces a new dataset that reveals with greater clarity than ever before how standards documentation is used in the examination of European patent applications, and also how often the resulting patents go on to be declared essential to widely adopted technology standards. As the patent system continues to play a key role in incentivising R&D investments and the exchange of technical knowledge, the proportion of patents that cite documents from SDOs is rising, which highlights the importance of patents for the development of those technologies regulated by standards.