under certain circumstances?

Under the London Agreement, for an EP patent designating the United Kingdom (UK) and granted in French or German and then extended to Hong Kong SAR, a full-text English or Chinese translation of the patent specification is not required. Only the title has to be provided in English and Chinese. For more information about the procedure for extending EP patents to Hong Kong SAR, please see: http://www.epo.org/patents/law/legal-texts/journal/informationEPO/archive/20091103.html?update=law 

A preliminary programme and further information on this forum on patent information from Asia can be found on the forum website at www.epo.org/emw2009. This year, the forum puts a strong focus on machine translation in patent searching, spotlights traditional knowledge from Asia and introduces patent information from India and the patent system in the Philippines.

You will find abstracts of the hot topics in this year's discussion rounds and corresponding discussion threads at http://eastmeetswest.european-patent-office.org/forum. We invite you to make use of this virtual forum and join our pre-conference discussions with experts and participants!

The world's "Big Five" intellectual property offices have announced a new co-operation framework. The heads of the EPO, JPO, USPTO, KIPO and SIPO met on 27 and 28 October 2008 in Jeju, Korea with the aim of setting up ten foundation projects for a work-sharing infrastructure.

See http://www.epo.org/about-us/press/releases/archive/2008/20081031.html and

http://www.epo.org/topics/news/2008/20081031.html for more details.

On 10 January 2008, the Thai Parliament ratified accession to the Paris Convention and the PCT. The government is now preparing the accession instrument to WIPO and in parallel the Ministerial Regulation to implement the two conventions in Thailand. Source: ECAP II Project