Some of you
may have received a reminder for payment of renewal fee from the Swiss Patent Office (Swiss
Federal Institute of Intellectual Property (IGE)) after your European patent
has been granted, although you cannot remember that you have validated your
European patent in Switzerland.
Those of
you who have received such reminder might consider the reminder as spam or
fraud, which is a legitimate reaction.
However, in
most cases, the reminder is not a fraud or spam but is indeed a real reminder officially
issued by the Swiss Patent Office.
But why
does the Swiss Patent Office issues such reminder although you have not
validated your European patent in Switzerland?
There are
two following reasons for this phenomenon.
1. Every European patent is automatically
validated in Switzerland.
You might
think you need to pay official fee or to designate national representative in order to
validate your European patent in a certain country. However, for the following
countries, the proprietor needs to take no action for the validation, i.e., a European
patent will be validated automatically from the date on which the mention of
the grant is published in the European Patent Bulletin (see https://www.epo.org/law-practice/legal-texts/html/natlaw/en/iv/index.htm).
Belgium
France
Germany
Ireland
Luxembourg
Monaco
Switzerland/Liechtenstein
the United
Kingdom.
Therefore,
whether you intended or not, your European patents will always be validated in
Switzerland.
2. The Swiss Patent Office provides
service to remind proprietor
In addition,
the Swiss Patent Office provides a service for free to remind the proprietor to
pay the renewal fee eight weeks before expiry of period (Art.
18d PO).
For these
reasons, you may receive a reminder from the Swiss Patent Office reminding you
to pay the renewal fee even though you do not remember validating your
European patent in Switzerland.
If you are
not interested in protection in Switzerland, you can just ignore the reminder
from the Swiss Patent Office. If you do so, the Swiss part of the European
patent will be lapsed due to non-payment of the renewal fee and you will not receive
any further reminders from the Swiss Patent Office in the following years.
