Preface
This brief note is not legal advice and is for educational purposes only.
Contact your patent attorney for more information.
Discussion
You filed a PCT (Patent Cooperation Treaty) application to preserve foreign filing rights. You may not have yet filed in any foreign country or region and you just received a communication from the European Patent Office titled:
“Entry into the European phase before the European Patent Office”
and labeled in the lower left corner “EPO Form 1201”.
Don’t panic. This communication is a preemptive notice by the European Patent Office (EPO). What the EPO did was assume you wanted to enter the EPO and took the PCT number and assigned a European application No.
This communication is generally issued about 10 months after publication.
Below is an example of such a communication with some details redacted.
Conclusion
As you can see EPO Form 1201 is a pretty good guide to entering the EPO.
Example EPO Form 1201 on next 4 pages
