12.19.17

Gemini version available ♊︎

Dr. Siegfried Broß Says UPC is in Constitutional and Democratic Grey Area, Abuses at the European Patent Office Contribute to That

Posted in Europe, Patents at 6:51 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Judge Broß has been writing lengthy articles on the subject

Bross article page

Summary: Warnings about the inherent problems with the Unified Patent Court (UPC) are stressed amid Constitutional complaints/backlash in Germany — almost certainly a fatal blow to “unitary” anything any time soon

LESS than a month ago (28th of November, 2017) there was a ceremony of the firm Cohausz & Florack in Munich. At the opening of the event there was a speech which has just been mentioned by UPC boosters like Christopher Weber and then FFII. UPC is mentioned about 3 dozen times and for preservation purposes (these things tend to vanish years down the line) we’ve made a copy of the translation (the copyright is the speaker’s). The FFII picked this paragraph from pages 16-17: “If we now look more closely at the Unified Patent Court, we need to consider the following issues individually. To start with, we need to point out that the planned Agreement on the Unified Patent Court within the EU is destined not to succeed from the outset because it is predated by quite fundamental misconceptions. This agreement does not cover patent law per se, but rather the patents granted in accordance with the European Patent Convention. At first look, there may be nothing to objectionable about this. However, if we consider the constellation professionally and objectively with some critical distance, we notice that the Agreement is only intended to afford judicial protection within the EU if a patent application was successful in accordance with the European Patent Convention. Conversely, no access to the EU’s Unified Patent Court is intended for failed applicants in proceedings before the European Patent Office. This finding throws up various questions and casts the whole project into a constitutional and democratic grey area.

There are many more things in these pages (especially the second half) which slam the UPC as a concept. Not entirely surprising, especially given the speaker. There are serious violations of the law and the principles of law at the very heart of the EPO. Broß spoke and wrote about these issues many times before (in journals, news sites, television and more).

Speaking of these violations, check out the last comment in IP Kat. Having written about whistleblowing for nearly a decade, I know that Judge Corcoran’s speech is protected and moreover, what he said wasn’t so different from what a lot of EPO staff was saying (and circulating) at the time. Battistelli and his Croatian bulldog just needed a convenient scapegoat at the time — someone whose life they can destroy to scare all the rest.

On your first reason, if public comments amount to a disciplinary offence, then the fact that they are pseudonymous doesn’t change that. The issue is what the comments say, not whether the public can identify who made them.

On your second reason, whistleblowing may sometimes be justified to expose serious wrongdoings in the public interest, but pseudonymous comments on the internet would not be the right way to go about it.

Where someone has serious allegations and evidence to back them up, but there is effectively no internal channel, it may be justified to take them to a reputable investigative journalist. Such a journalist would check the facts before publication, and protect the source. A report in a reputable newspaper would consequently be much more believable and much more likely to achieve results.

While I’ve not seen the comments made in the present case, the pseudonymous nature and absence of independent checking would make it difficult to determine whether they were justified by hard evidence. Or were they merely repeating allegations made elsewhere and stating opinions? Or possibly a mixture of all these?

Just remember that, as we wrote on Thursday morning, the Corcoran affair serves to show that at the EPO the criminals try to criminalise those who speak about their crimes. A system so chronically incapable of introspection would be characteristic of small dictatorships in Africa, certainly not Bavaria.

Share in other sites/networks: These icons link to social bookmarking sites where readers can share and discover new web pages.
  • Reddit
  • email

Decor ᶃ Gemini Space

Below is a Web proxy. We recommend getting a Gemini client/browser.

Black/white/grey bullet button This post is also available in Gemini over at this address (requires a Gemini client/browser to open).

Decor ✐ Cross-references

Black/white/grey bullet button Pages that cross-reference this one, if any exist, are listed below or will be listed below over time.

Decor ▢ Respond and Discuss

Black/white/grey bullet button If you liked this post, consider subscribing to the RSS feed or join us now at the IRC channels.

DecorWhat Else is New


  1. Links 06/06/2023: OpenSUSE Plans for Leap

    Links for the day



  2. Gemini Links 06/06/2023: Bubble 4.0, Neutral News, and Older Bits

    Links for the day



  3. IBM's War on Open (Look at the Pattern of Layoffs at Red Hat)

    By abandoning OpenSource.com and OpenOffice.org/LibreOffice IBM sends out a clear signal that it doesn’t understand or simply does not care about the community of Free software users; its siege against the FSF and other institutions never ended and today we look at who’s being laid off or shown the door (the work environment is intentionally being made worse)



  4. Links 06/06/2023: IceWM 3.4.0 and Liveslak 1.7.0

    Links for the day



  5. Gemini Links 06/06/2023: Apple Might Kill VR, Tea Tea Deluxe 1.2.7 and Tea Land

    Links for the day



  6. IRC Proceedings: Monday, June 05, 2023

    IRC logs for Monday, June 05, 2023



  7. Links 05/06/2023: Debian 12 Almost Ready, Hong Kong 'Cannot' Remember Tiananmen Massacre

    Links for the day



  8. Gemini Links 05/06/2023: New Ship in Cosmic Voyage, Stack Overflow Moderator Strike

    Links for the day



  9. IRC Proceedings: Sunday, June 04, 2023

    IRC logs for Sunday, June 04, 2023



  10. Links 04/06/2023: Unifont 15.0.05 and PCLinuxOS Stuff

    Links for the day



  11. Gemini Links 04/06/2023: Wayland and the Old Computer Challenge

    Links for the day



  12. StatCounter: GNU/Linux (Including ChromeOS) Grows to 8% Market Share Worldwide

    This month’s numbers from StatCounter are good for GNU/Linux (including ChromeOS, which technically has both GNU and Linux); the firm assesses logs from 3 million sites and shows Windows down to 66% in desktops/laptops (a decade ago it was above 90%) with modest growth for GNU/Linux, which is at an all-time high, even if one does not count ChromeOS that isn’t freedom- or privacy-respecting



  13. Journalism Cannot and Quite Likely Won't Survive on the World Wide Web

    We’re reaching the point where the overwhelming majority of new pages on the Web (the World Wide Web) are basically junk, sometimes crafted not by humans; how to cope with this rapid deterioration is still an unknown — an enigma that demands hard answers or technical workarounds



  14. Do Not Assume Pensions Are Safe, Especially When Managed by Mr. EPOTIF Benoît Battistelli and António Campinos

    With the "hoax" that is the financial assessment by António Campinos (who is deliriously celebrating the inauguration of illegal and unconstitutional kangaroo courts) we urge EPO workers to check carefully the integrity of their pensions, seeing that pension promises have been broken for years already



  15. Links 04/06/2023: Why Flatpak and Wealth of Devices With GNU/Linux

    Links for the day



  16. Gemini Links 04/06/2023: Rosy Crow 1.1.3 and NearlyFreeSpeech.NET

    Links for the day



  17. IRC Proceedings: Saturday, June 03, 2023

    IRC logs for Saturday, June 03, 2023



  18. Links 04/06/2023: Azure Outage Again (So Many!) and Tiananmen Massacre Censored

    Links for the day



  19. Links 03/06/2023: Qubes OS 4.2.0 RC1 and elementaryOS Updates for May

    Links for the day



  20. Gemini Links 03/06/2023: Hidden Communities and Exam Prep is Not Education

    Links for the day



  21. Links 03/06/2023: IBM Betraying LibreOffice Some More (After Laying off LibreOffice Developers)

    Links for the day



  22. Gemini Links 03/06/2023: Bubble Woes and Zond Updates

    Links for the day



  23. Links 03/06/2023: Apache NetBeans 18 and ArcaOS 5.0.8

    Links for the day



  24. IRC Proceedings: Friday, June 02, 2023

    IRC logs for Friday, June 02, 2023



  25. The Developing World Abandons Microsoft Windows, GNU/Linux at All-Time Highs on Desktops/Laptops

    Microsoft, with 80 billion dollars in longterm debt and endless layoffs, is losing the monopolies; the media doesn’t mention this, but some publicly-accessible data helps demonstrate that



  26. Links 02/06/2023: Elive ‘Retrowave’ Stable and Microsoft's Half a Billion Dollar Fine for LinkeIn Surveillance in Europe

    Links for the day



  27. Linux Foundation 'Research' Has a New Report and Of Course It Uses Only Proprietary Software

    The Linux Foundation has a new report, promoted by Clickfraud Spamnil and others; of course they’re rejecting Free software, they’re just riding the “Linux” brand and speak of “Open Source” (which they reject themselves)



  28. Links 02/06/2023: Arti 1.1.5 and SQL:2023

    Links for the day



  29. Gemini Links 02/06/2023: Vimwiki Revisited, SGGS Revisited

    Links for the day



  30. Geminispace/GemText/Gemini Protocol Turn 4 on June 20th

    Gemini is turning 4 this month (on the 20th, according to the founder) and I thought I’d do a spontaneous video about how I use Gemini, why it's so good, and why it’s still growing (Stéphane Bortzmeyer fixed the broken cron job — or equivalent of it — a day or two after I had mentioned the issue)


RSS 64x64RSS Feed: subscribe to the RSS feed for regular updates

Home iconSite Wiki: You can improve this site by helping the extension of the site's content

Home iconSite Home: Background about the site and some key features in the front page

Chat iconIRC Channel: Come and chat with us in real time

Recent Posts