A Treasure-Trove of Travaux

The sun is shining, the birds are singing (the Kat assumes. To be honest, it’s mostly the song of traffic that is reaching his ears at the moment, but he likes to imagine that today is the type of day on which birds would, if the mood took them, sing and that he would therefore hear them if the passage of vehicles on the Euston Road was not drowning them out – he’s a country Kat at heart) and the Kat has been perusing the EPO’s website. He was delighted to stumble upon (although if he had read the press release that was posted on the EPO’s website on Monday then he might have found it by less serendipitous methods) a most significant repository for anyone interested in the history and development of the EPC.

Buried within the archive of the legal texts sub-menu of the law and practice section of the website lies treasure (and treasure it most certainly is): The Travaux Préparatoires of the EPC 1973. All of the historical documentation relating to the 178 Articles of the Convention and 106 Rules of the Implementing Regulations, all lovingly scanned and bundled in .pdf format, can now be accessed at the click of a button. However, English monoglots beware – while most of the material is available in the three official languages of the Convention, there is a stern warning that “The documents produced before 1969 cannot be provided in English as this was not an official language in the period before that date. These documents therefore are provided in French and German”. It is also worth noting that the scanned documents are saved as .pdf images and have not been put through OCR software, therefore no free-text search is possible and the bounties of any online translation tool will also be withheld unless you are willing to transcribe the documents first. Therefore, if you are interested in the provenance of the categories of excluded subject matter, the voting rights under the Convention, or the Rule on the form and content of the claim, or indeed any other of the remaining 281 Articles and Rules, then you need look no further. A treasure-trove of information awaits.

Happy reading!