12.02.17
Gemini version available ♊︎The European Patent Office No Longer Acts Like a Patent Office But a Prosecutor
Prosecution ‘industry’ served, not the real industry
Summary: With Patent Prosecution Highway (PPH), Unitary Patent (UPC) and “early certainty” it seems clear that the EPO’s objectives are not aligned with those representative of a proper, functioning patent office
THE EPO continues trying — however futile this effort may seem — to distract from any meaningful discussion about the crisis. The "SME" nonsense (not a new thing), for example, was repeated once again yesterday. It was repeated pretty much every single day in November. “How can a business leverage the power of patents and other IP rights to achieve business success?” Those are the sorts of loaded questions brought up every day by the EPO. It has become too tiring to even bother responding to them.
“The UPC is going nowhere, but Bristows keeps spreading fake news about it.”“The objective of the study,” wrote the EPO in another tweet, “is to assess the role played by the current European patent system,” linking to the so-called ‘study’ which is not objective and has already been debunked. It’s the EPO-commissioned propaganda for the EPO and its UPC lobby.
Two days ago we wrote about the latest fake news about the UPC. Check out this comment that says “K. Mooney, W. Pors and consorts have been ridden by an illness called “wishful thinking”.”
To quote the whole comment (JJ is Jo Johnson):
When JJ is talking about negotiations re post Brexit stay of the UK in the UPC, it clearly means that all those claiming that the stay is easy to obtain (K. Mooney, W. Pors and consorts) have been ridden by an illness called “wishful thinking”.
It is understandable that they see big profits flowing away, so that self illusion is an attempt to overcome the loss. The more so since they have invested a lot of time and efforts in devising the RoP of the UPC.
It would be better if they would come back to reality rather than trying to pull wool over our eyes!
The UPC is going nowhere, but Bristows keeps spreading fake news about it. Yesterday it wrote about Belgium. This is nothing noteworthy (of progress); it’s a meaningless move, as Belgium has, by Bristows’ own admission, “already ratified the UPC Agreement, and has made a declaration regarding its provisional application.”
“The agenda of the EPO, as set in stone by the UPC, is worse than malignant. It may be fatal to Europe’s producing industries (as opposed to some law firms in England and Germany).”Quite frankly, it no longer surprises us that Team UPC and Team Battistelli are lying so much. Both are rife with abuse. Check out yesterday’s EPO puff piece about Brazil and Tunisia (warning: epo.org link), former Portuguese and French colonies, respectively (the next EPO President is a dual Portuguese/French national, as we noted in relation to the validation agreements with Tunisia and Angola, another former Portuguese colony where his father had been born).
This time it’s about the Patent Prosecution Highway (PPH), which speeds up examination at the expense of meticulous analysis. To quote the EPO: “Two major [sic] agreements signed by the EPO with Brazil and Tunisia will enter into force today. The agreements will mean new services for companies and inventors from Europe and the two countries and support innovation through legally robust patents.”
How many European Patents even come from Tunisia? How many patent applications? Brazil, in spite of its large population side, isn’t so major a player either. So for the EPO to call these “major agreements” with a straight face? Come on…
As someone pointed out in the 14th and last comment this week:
Even it might be legal, it is simply unbelievable to go from the much heralded “early certainty” into “long term uncertainty”.
If it should be necessary it shows how badly the EPO is managed!
The document linked to by head down is a paper introduced in 2009 by 3 member states two of which,DE and NL had deferred examination. It was an attempt to resolve the backlog problem, may be a first instance level, but does not work at the BA level.
If files are under deferred examination, they will not any longer appear in the statistics. This a clear attempt to cheat, as the secret hope is that lot of these applications will be withdrawn at one moment or the other.
It is not sure that the member state will be willing to wait to have their share of the renewal fees.
Wait and see if the new chairman of the AC will accept to put the proposal of the agenda of the AC. Bad management should be sanctioned, certainly not encouraged!
This relates to the UPC in the sense that the envisioned system passes or ‘offloads’ the task of proper patent examination to courts, where fees are humongous and the language spoken may not been understood at all by the defendants.
The agenda of the EPO, as set in stone by the UPC, is worse than malignant. It may be fatal to Europe’s producing industries (as opposed to some law firms in England and Germany). The “official languages”, which oddly enough include French but not Spanish, tell quite a lot about who would literally profit from the destruction of one’s own national scientific sector. █
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