The Eurasian Patent Convention became operative on January 1, 1996, and can be designated in PCT applications (under code EA) on or after that date. Its present members are: Armenia (since February 27) , Azerbaijan, Belarus, Kazakhstan (all since January 1) , Kyrgyzstan (since January 13) , Moldova (since February 16) , the Russian Federation, Tajikistan and Turkmenistan (all since January 1) . This means that in addition to the Baltic republics, which have oriented themselves towards the EPO, the only former Soviet republics not to have joined the new convention are Georgia, Ukraine and Uzbekistan, although Georgia and Ukraine were both signatories to the original treaty.

The standard for patentability under the Eurasian Patent Convention is now the usual one of novelty, inventive step and industrial applicability. However, the treaty setting up the convention left to the Convention's Administrative Council (consisting of the heads of the national patent offices of the member states) the definitions to be adopted for these features. In fact, world-wide publication, use, or disclosure are destructive of novelty, as is a previously filed Eurasian patent application. Disclosures by or deriving from an applicant or an inventor are, however, subject to a six-month grace period from the disclosure if an application is filed in the Eurasian Patent Office or, apparently, some other patent office where priority is claimed from it.

Under the Convention a single patent application designating all of the member countries is filed in a single language (Russian) in a central patent office in Moscow. Prosecution of that application is similar to that of the European Patent Office. Thus there will be an early publication of the application eighteen months from its filing date or any claimed priority date and examination must be requested within six months of that publication. However, at the end of the prosecution there is no need to "complete" the patent in the various designated countries nor file a translation into the languages of the designated countries whose official language is not Russian. Renewal fees for the Eurasian patent will be dependent on the number of countries in which the patentee wishes to keep the patent in force.

The term of the patent is twenty years from the filing of the application. As with the new Russian law the publication of the application before grant gives rise to a right to compensation for use of the invention in the period between this publication and the actual grant of the patent.

An interesting side effect of the use of the European Patent Convention (EPC) as a model for the Eurasian Patent Convention is its attempt to incorporate a counterpart to Article 69 of the EPC on the interpretation of claims. Rule 12 of the Eurasian Patent Convention provides that the scope of protection shall be determined by the claims, taking into account each feature of the claims (possibly including an equivalent of such a feature) and that claims shall be interpreted in the light of the description. Such interpretation being not only to elucidate what is unclear or indefinite but to determine the true meaning of the claim (which is not to be either its literal meaning nor its general inventive idea) even if the claim is not on its face ambiguous.