Adapt or die. That's the choice facing the European Patent Office, according to its president, Alison Brimelow.

Her task it is to prepare the organization for major change, she said last week in an interview, giving a bleak assessment of the patent system. "Throughout its history the patent system has been hotly contested, even resulting in violence, and consensus was remarkably rare," she said referring to the period before 1973, when European countries signed the European Patent Convention, which created the EPO.

The past three decades have seen consensus in Europe, but Brimelow, who has been EPO president for seven months, said the period of relative calm is coming to an end. "Thirty years ago it was possible to find consensus. Now there are more doubts about patents," she said.

She shared her view in a recent blog posting. During its 35 years, the EPO has often been criticized for being an ivory-tower institution dismissive of criticism, particularly from the biotech and computing fields. "The EPO came to birth in what was probably the only relatively upbeat period in patent history. So we have been perhaps conditioned by those circumstances to assume that challenge to the effectiveness and usefulness of the system is new and unreasonable," she wrote.

New strains on the global patent system are among the threats to the status quo. This is partly due to rapid advances in China and other developing countries, which are asserting influence over the system. There is also the debate over patents on life-saving drugs in the world's poorest countries.

"There are lots of voices, not just here in Europe, asking where next?" she said in the interview.

China and intellectual property are usually mentioned together because a Chinese firm has copied an idea patented elsewhere. That gives a false impression for two reasons, Brimelow said.

"Counterfeiting is a global problem; it doesn't help to pretend that it's a problem just in one or two places," she said. But since Chinese inventors are now more prolific than their European counterparts, their products are as likely to be counterfeited as counterfeit.

China is starting to prosecute intellectual-property infringements. The first notable case involved France's Schneider Electric. A Chinese court fined the company last September and ordered it to stop manufacturing five types of miniature circuit-breakers based on utility models held by low-voltage equipment maker Chint Group, in the eastern province of Zhejiang.

"The Schneider case illustrates the danger of not being able to understand Chinese prior art," Brimelow said.