Why does the Swiss Patent Office issues reminders for renewal fee?

 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.