Posted for Alison Abbott

It took four acrimonious rounds of voting, but on 1 March Benoît Battistelli finally won the majority required for election as president of the European Patent Office (press release).

The EPO has 36 member states, and three-quarters of them must agree on a candidate. Battistelli is currently Director General of the French National Institute of Industrial Property, and takes over from the UK’s Alison Brimelow in July for a five-year term (Battistelli CV).

Some countries, like Germany and the UK, have strong national patent offices which conduct their own searches and examinations, and they are lucrative businesses.

Such EPO member states would like to devolve work from the EPO to their national offices, while others want to maintain its centralisation. This is a major source of tension. Battistelli is likely to be a centralist, though he has not shown his cards explicitly.

During his mandate, Battistelli is likely to oversee regular challenges to patents related to biological entities like genetically modified crops and stem cells which test the ambiguous ‘morality clause’ in the EPO’s constitution. He will also work with the European Commission on longer-term plans to create a true European patent, which would confer continent-wide protection instead of the country-by-country protection offered by the EPO’s own system.

Image: EPO