Patent law in the Netherlands
Patent law in the Netherlands, or simply Dutch patent law, is mainly governed by the Kingdom Patents Act () and the European Patent Convention. A patent covering the Netherlands can be obtained through three different routes: through the direct filing of a national patent application with the Netherlands Patent Office () (direct national route), through the filing of a European patent application (European route), or through the filing of an international application under the Patent Cooperation Treaty followed by the entry into European phase of said international application (Euro-PCT route). The Dutch patent has a term of 20 years and has effect in the (European and Caribbean) Netherlands, Curaçao and Sint Maarten. Aruba has its own patent system. Dutch patent National patents applied for directly with Netherlands Patent Office are so-called ‘registration patents’ (): no substantial examination takes place, and the patent is granted if certain formalities have been fulfilled. European patents designating the Netherlands have the same effect as direct national patents, provided that the patent description is translated in English (if not already in English) and the claims in Dutch (The Netherlands has ratified the London Agreement (2000)). Also unitary patents apply in the Netherlands after entry into force of the Unified Patent Court agreement in June 2023. The unitary effect (which formally only applies in the European part of the Netherlands), is automatically extended to Curacao, Sint Maarten and Bonaire, Sint Eustatius and Saba). Inventions have to fulfill three requirements to be patentable: they have to be new, inventive and industrially applicable. Patents can be licensed and such license has effect against third parties only after registration with the Intellectual property office. The patents act provides for the grant of compulsory licenses in the public interest if the patent owner refuses to grant a license, and grant of compulsory licenses to the Kingdom in wartime. History Although a patent system existed in the Netherlands as part of French law before, the January 1817 patents act was the first patent act approved in the United Kingdom of the Netherlands. The act was repealed in 1869. In 1910 the Patent Act came into effect, which after being renamed to Kingdom Patents Act in 1968 was revised substantially in 1979 to provide for the entry into force of the European Patent Convention. The success of the EPC led to a decline in national patents applied for directly at the Dutch Patent Office, which resulted in the conversion to a registration patent () in the Rijksoctrooiwet 1995, the 1995 version of the Kingdom Patents Act that was a recast of the Rijksoctrooiwet. Territorial scope From the start, the 1910 Patents Act has been applicable for the whole Dutch Empire, although from 1956 until the 1960s changes were made to the act in order to reduce the backlog in patent applications and to apply the London act of the Paris Convention that initially did not apply to Suriname and the Netherlands Antilles, as this reduced the approval procedure. From 1995, Aruba fell