03.15.17
Gemini version available ♊︎New Examples of Fake News About the Unitary Patent (UPC), Courtesy of Patent Law Firms Looking to Prey on Gullible SMEs
“All warfare is based on deception” (many quotes to that effect, basically the idea that disseminating lies is acceptable when you gain power by it)
This is what Team UPC vainly calls “the unanimous UPC vote.” The vote on UPC isn’t what they tell us it was.
Summary: Tackling some of the latest fake news about UPC (too much to keep abreast of) and the misleading figures proclaiming to be EPO ‘results’
Steve Howe, writing on behalf of his employer (a law firm), has just supplied us with an excellent new example of fake news about the UPC, courtesy of greedy UPC hopefuls, which we collectively refer to as Team UPC because they not only lobby for the UPC but are also the same people who came up with it, wrote it, promoted it, and now hand it over for politicians to sign. It’s coup basically. It’s an insult to British and European (EU) democracy.
Howe’s headline is a loaded statement and a lie, wanting us to believe that UPC is inevitable here in the UK, and that it’s only a matter of “when”, not “if”. Howe’s closing words are these: “So the current signs are that the Unitary Patent Package may come into effect within the next year, long before the UK finally leaves the EU. However, as we have seen over the last year, predicting the future is a very inexact science, and the path towards Brexit and the path to the Unitary Patent Package probably have some mileage left.”
Well, that last sentence was deemed/considered particularly catchy by UPC antagonists. Putting aside the lies and lobbying in that paragraph (the “inevitability” tactics), there is no disclosure and it very much resembles other fake news which we have come across very recently in the UK (e.g. [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6]), even in blogs without disclosures (yes, we are looking at you, IP Kat).
In its official Twitter account Howe’s employer wrote: “After @theresa_may’s Art. 50 statement, our very own Steve Howe looks at what comes 1st, Brexit or unitary patent?”
How about neither? Or only one of them (as the two are inherently and patently incompatible)? Of course, Howe’s employer presents loaded statements, which make us assume that both are done and dusted, confirmed and destined to be true irrespective of some supposedly absent/non-existent opposition.
The above is not the exception but the norm. We have, by this point at least, become accustomed to such fake news. It happens every day and we’re failing to keep track of it all. There is certainly a lot more on the way.
Yesterday we saw Wolters Kluwer’s Christine Robben (Team UPC) promoting the latest propaganda from her employer. Team UPC now amplifies all that fake news about UPC. Here is the latest pile of lies. Just notice what they DON’T say. It’s just an echo chamber. See the screenshot at the top, showing what kind of ‘vote’ there was in Germany, at 1:30 AM (yes, AM!). Is German democracy becoming as big a farce as Turkish democracy?
For information and background, see what we wrote about Germany only days ago:
- How Big a Lie is Team UPC Spreading About Germany and Unitary Patent? A Must Read.
- Germany Cannot Ratify the UPC Because Britain is Leaving the EU and Unitary Patent Strongly/Strictly Depends on the UK
EIP, which has been part of the UPC boosting (this was noted here repeatedly in the past), is meanwhile contributing to the latest propaganda by writing that “German Parliament paves the way for European patent reform,” without noting the full facts. “Last paragraph,” as Francisco Moreno points out to them, says “[o]nly 35 of 360 Bundestag members voted (at 1:30AM!) 2/3 majority is required when dealing with delegation of sovereign rights…”
Out of 600+ actually, not 360. Francisco Moreno later took the above screenshots and told me: “Right, 630 members! Here, the 35 members present at the unanimous #UPC vote.”
As Benjamin Henrion put it, “you mean this vote is not constitutional?” They just need to get politicians to operate based on false assumptions, like making voters vote based on fake news (and when they realise it was fake all along it’s already too late to change one’s vote).
“No idea,” Moreno told Henrion, “but last paragraph suggest that this vote could be vulnerable.” German readers and Dutch people have already told us so too. It’s like a classroom inside a massive school conspiring to vote in the small hours of the morning to help construct lobbying material for Team UPC. That’s what it looks like anyway…
Also revisit what we wrote about the UK on Sunday night:
- Fake News From the EPO and Team UPC About Unitary Patent in the UK in Spite of Brexit
- British Site ‘Managing IP’ Continues to Organise UPC Lobbying Events to Promote the Unitary Patent in the UK, Isle of Man, Maybe Even Ireland and Beyond
Last but not least, this is the latest about Spain:
- Unitary Patent (UPC) Misinformation in Spanish Media and EPO-Connected (Paid) Media That Lobbies Spain
- No, Spain is Not Joining the UPC, That’s Just What UPC Lobbyists Want Everyone to Believe
Moreno is keeping abreast of fake news in the Spanish media. He writes about it in Spanish, so our Spanish readers are encouraged to follow his writings.
The above are rebuttals to fake news from the past week alone. We also needed to post many rebuttals to the EPO‘s fake ‘results’, namely:
- EPO Record Low on Quality of European Patents (EPs) in 2016
- The European Patent Office is Wasting Its Already Limited Budget on Misleading Press Releases/Paid-for Coverage That Overlook Sharp Decline in Patent Quality
- Latest EPO ‘Results’ Should be Grounds for Immediate Dismissal of Battistelli Rather Than Celebrations
- ‘Evil Tongues’ Inside and Outside the EPO Explain Why Battistelli’s 2016 ‘Results’ Are Bad While the Media Mindlessly Repeats EPO Management’s Talking Points
- The EPO is Lying About Patent Quality in Its Official Web Site
- Higher Patent Quality Guarded Even Under the Trump Administration While the EPO Goes the Other Way
- Unscientific and Offensive: EPO Deletes From the Map Countries Where Number of Applications at the EPO Has Declined!
- The European Patent Office is in a State of Collapse and It Coughs Up Rubbish Patents Until Its Death
Yesterday, Barker Brettell LLP published this piece titled “Grants up, backlog down – EPO Annual report 2016,” in which it had constructed and spread misleading spin. it does not tell readers that patent quality is down, applications are down, and skillful people are leaving the Office, which is starting to resemble just a registration office (as insiders feared).
“Cool map!” Francisco Moreno wrote about it (tongue in cheek). “If this tendency continues, the EPO will be granting in 2017 100% more patents than in 2010, with only a 10% increase in examiners…” (nothing like this has happened at the USPTO in the same period).
That’s the ‘Battistelli effect’….
Another Battistelli effect is the effect on integrity. The EPO lies so much these days that almost every single tweet (except event promotion) is a lie. Yesterday it said “Medical technology remains the field with most patent applications filed in 2016…”
Click on the link and see what they don’t say. It actually DECLINED in the past year (minus and red); Like patent applications at the EPO in general….
Another EPO tweet from yesterday said: “These virtual classroom events are ideal for SME staff new to IP management…”
The EPO cares not at all about SMEs, as it promotes the UPC that’s against them, and then there is systematic discrimination against their applications (left at the bottom of the pile).
The European Patent Office has lost all respect and even insiders are sick of it. Read the following new comment from George Brock-Nannestad of Denmark, who in his fourth paragraph onwards speaks of the UPC and SMEs that should be up in arms over it (“I am surprised that the SMEs are not up in arms,” but some noticed and spoke out). To quote:
Dear Merpel,
thank you for having undertaken the onerous and disheartening task of keeping tabs on what goes on at the European Patent Office. I can well understand that you are worn down. Your coverage as the main source and a few other sources have provided me with a total of 1.35 GB of material that only goes from bad to worse. I have kept this because it reflects a scandal of momentous dimensions, and one could fear that some of it will disappear simply due to public embarrassment. On the other hand, reading the material is not for the weak, and I cannot recommend it.
I think that the IPKat posts have been the only trustworthy ones in the field, but the comments only have very little trustworthiness. Collectively, though, the comments through their mere numbers, do draw ugly pictures.
I myself have been driven to saturation, I have become numb, there is very little that can shock me anymore, and I am only wondering ‘WHY’? Who benefits from this situation, except the perpetrators, of course. But where are the checks, where are those who ought to insist on adhering to the European Patent Convention? It is true that the subject matter is somewhat esoteric, and very few really understand what we had as a smooth-running machinery that is rapidly becoming a formalities-only examination and early certainty of acceptance. A whole collection of jurisprudence on the fundamental properties of a patent system that serves society will become an empty academic exercise that was good for a period of perhaps 25 years, but which will stand as a non-reachable Utopia because of the constant attrition.
I am surprised that the SMEs are not up in arms. Maybe they believe the hogwash that politicians have told them about the UPC. They are dependent on the state (delegated, though the power is) to weed out the patent applications that do not merit acceptance. To an SME faced with a patent that is purportedly infringed it does not matter whether the company prevails in a court case, if the result is 5 years into the future. It is just as bad as ILOAT providing justice to wronged employees of the European Patent Office so many years after the infraction.
SMEs do not have the stamina to survive an unreasonable court case. The only thing left for SMEs is to be pro-active, i.e. do the work of the European Patent Office. Search independently, file observations, but probably better: file good oppositions. Get the opposition count up! It is expensive, but it only takes one or two saved court cases to fully recoup the costs. But getting the count up also changes the statistics at the European Patent Office, and it is something that its present management may not like but can do very little about. Well, they can increase the opposition fee to the ridiculous, just as the fee for opposing a trademark in Denmark was increased by a colossal amount more than 20 years ago, because some big players leaning on the authorities thought that they had a right to bad trademarks and resented that they were being hampered by successful oppositions from the general public. Who is leaning on the EPO?
Again, many thanks, and please continue to moderate the comments that come in to the last posts. There are now at least two posts that have more than 200 comments, but it cannot be helped if there are so few posts.
Very disheartened,
George Brock-Nannestad
Brock-Nannestad was quoted in the Danish media after we had published a series of articles regarding Jesper Kongstad; he probably understands that the shenanigans at the EPO are harmful to the entire profession centered around patents — if not well beyond it — and moreover it’s incredibly damaging to Europe’s economy (much like the UPC promises to be, essentially giving corporate, globalist sovereignty over Europe to few large corporations, with a little ‘trickle down’ effect to their patent lawyers in Europe). █
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