08.09.17
Gemini version available ♊︎Sinking Patent Quality at the Brazilian Patent and Trademark Office (BPTO)
Has Battistelli gotten a patent on this policy?
Summary: The neglect of patent quality (and high-quality assessment of applications) is becoming a worldwide phenomenon, having already become the norm in Europe
EARLIER today IAM published this ad which claims that Brazil “may grant 230,000 pending patent applications to eliminate backlog” and if it sounds familiar (recipe for disaster), then it’s probably because of the EPO. So Brazil wants to ‘pull a Battistelli’ by granting bogus patents? Supposedly to pretend it’s doing well?
“So Brazil wants to ‘pull a Battistelli’ by granting bogus patents?”The USPTO did something similar a few decades ago and look what it got them… a country saturated with patent trolls and thousands of lawsuits per year, with almost trillions on the line (aggregated).
The ad (self-promotional piece) from IAM says: “The government is considering an emergency measure to eliminate the Brazilian Patent and Trademark Office’s (BPTO) chronic patent backlog by automatically granting 230,000 pending applications by 2020. The government labelled this proposed emergency measure an “extraordinary solution” for the problem, and a draft of the plan has been introduced for public discussion.”
That is a very bad idea. India and China dealt with a similar situation, but they did not label it “extraordinary solution” or an “emergency”. They just hired more staff.
“…the whole PPH programme there (officially started at the beginning of July) was primarily a publicity stunt of Battistelli, timed to distract from all the awful things he had been doing.”Incidentally, earlier this week we saw another PPH ‘article’ (self-promotional piece). It was the fourth such piece from that region (southeast Asia) regarding PPH and the EPO. Denise Mirandah and Rudina Pescante (of Mirandah Asia) miss the point that the EPO essentially abolished patent neutrality, not only with PACE (introduced covertly) but also this so-called ‘highway’. This piece is about PPH (PACE is mentioned also) and it says this: “The European patent application will be processed in an accelerated manner once the request for participation in the PPH pilot programme has been granted. EPO’s existing PACE programme, a popular free programme for accelerating prosecution of patent applications, can be applied by analogy to the prosecution of European patent applications processed under the present agreements of EPO with IPOPHL.”
The problem though, as we noted before, is that these countries barely have any EPs (about 3 orders of magnitude less than large economies in the West) and the whole PPH programme there (officially started at the beginning of July) was primarily a publicity stunt of Battistelli, timed to distract from all the awful things he had been doing. He even did these stunts in countries with not a single EP! █
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