The conversation usually starts in the factory. Somebody has improved a mechanism, reduced a step, found a way to make the thing quieter or cheaper, and the sentence that follows is that it should be patented in Europe. The sentence is premature in both directions: it may be that what you have is not patentable, and it may be that what you have is patentable and should not be patented. Sorting that out costs nothing and saves the most predictable expense in this whole field.
Patent, design, secret: what each one actually protects
- A patent protects a technical solution. Not a product, not an idea, not a market position: a solution to a technical problem, which has to be new anywhere in the world, involve an inventive step over what was already known, and be capable of industrial application. And it is published. The bargain is explicit — the public learns exactly how your invention works, and in exchange you get the right to stop others using it for a term fixed by law.
- A design right protects an appearance. Nothing about how the thing works, everything about how it looks. It is quicker to obtain, far cheaper to keep, and it is the right answer more often than people expect — because what gets copied on a European marketplace is usually the look, not the engineering. If a copy of your product would be recognisable from a photograph, this is probably the right you needed.
- A secret is not filed anywhere. A process, a formulation, a setting, a supplier: things whose value is that nobody else knows them. European law protects undisclosed know-how, and it protects it on condition that you treated it as secret — confidentiality undertakings, restricted access, marked documents, employees and subcontractors who signed something. A secret ends the day it leaks and no office can restore it. It also costs nothing to maintain, which is why it quietly beats a patent for a great deal of factory knowledge.
Why selling or publishing first destroys the patent
Novelty for a patent is absolute and worldwide, and your own disclosure counts against you exactly as a stranger's would. A stand at a trade fair, a catalogue, a marketplace listing, a technical article, a video, a sample handed to a prospective customer without a confidentiality undertaking: each of those can make the invention part of the state of the art. What the examiner and, later, an opponent look at is what was available to the public before your filing date, whoever made it available. Unlike designs, the European patent system offers no general grace period for the applicant's own disclosure — the exceptions are narrow and not something to build a launch on. So the order is not negotiable: file first, even a first application whose only job is to secure the date, then show.
What the European route gives you, and what it becomes afterwards
A European patent application is filed once, examined once, in one language, by a single office, and that is the attractive part. What surprises people is what happens after grant. On the classical route, the granted European patent is not a single right: it becomes a bundle of national patents in the states you choose to pursue, each one living under its own national law, each with its own translation requirements and its own schedule of renewal fees. Alongside that route a unitary title and a dedicated court now exist, which changes where a dispute is heard and what a single decision reaches. Whether that suits you depends on where your market actually is and where you would be willing to litigate, and it is a decision to take with a European patent attorney rather than from a general description.
Which means the filing is the small part of the bill. The costs that follow are the exchanges with the examiner, the national validations and translations, the professional fees that attach to each of them, and above all the renewal fees that fall due periodically in every country where you keep the patent alive — and which rise over the life of the title rather than staying flat. Companies abandon patents constantly, and rarely because they stopped believing in the invention: the renewals keep arriving on a product whose sales never came. A patent is a subscription, and the question is not whether you can pay to enter but whether you can pay to stay.
The question nobody asks first: would you actually sue?
A patent does not enforce itself. Nobody checks the register before copying you, no authority polices infringement on your behalf, and a certificate on the wall stops nothing. The right it gives you is the right to bring an action — before a national court or the dedicated court, with technical expertise, lawyers in a language you do not speak, a timetable measured in procedural stages rather than in working days, and a defendant whose first move will be to attack the validity of your patent and ask the court to cancel it. That is the real cost of a patent, and it arrives at the worst possible moment: when a competitor is already selling and your cash is already committed to the launch.
So the question comes before everything else: do you have the means and the intention to bring that action? If the answer is no — and for many exporters it honestly is — the patent is not protection, it is display spending, and there are better places to put the same money. A design right on the appearance that actually gets copied. A secret kept properly, with contracts and access control, where the value is in the process. A trade mark and a distribution agreement, because customers buy a name and a channel more than they buy a mechanism. And speed: for a lot of products the real margin is the lead time a copier needs, and the way to extend it is to keep moving, not to file. If the answer is yes, then file narrowly and deliberately — in the countries where the market is, on the claims you would defend — rather than everywhere, thinly, on everything.
Before you spend anything, write these lines down. What exactly is the invention, stated as a technical effect rather than as a description of the product. Has it been shown, sold, published or sampled anywhere, by you or by a supplier, and when. Where is the market that would justify a national title. And who, by name, would sign the authorisation to start an infringement action, and out of which budget. If the last line has no name on it, take the money and buy a registered design and a properly filed trade mark — they are the rights that stop the copies you will actually meet.
Where to read it yourself
Official pages, opened and checked on 15 October 2026. Where a rule changes, these are the addresses that change with it — this article does not.