05.27.18
Software Patents Advocacy and UPC Lies Go Hand in Hand
Summary: The push for UPC, which accompanies the lobby for software patents in Europe, is still based on a large pile of lies and false projections of commencement
Has crooked Benoît Battistelli corrupted enough European/French media at the expense of EPO users (stakeholders, applicants) for this media to ignore his serious abuses of the law if not overt corruption? In a new article from AFP (France), mentioning Battistelli and António Campinos (the two Frenchmen who are friends), we are seeing little more than classic talking points and even lies. “Brevet unitaire européen: l’OEB est prêt, assure son président” is the headline and is has been cross-posted by various French-speaking sites, e.g. [1, 2].
“Where are the European authorities/authoritarians? Where are all the French politicians? When will they understand that the EPO under Battistelli has become an enormous liability for their reputation?”The EPO has become a loose monster, totally out of control and without anything that resembles accountability, let alone oversight. The EPO has long misused its budget to corrupt/pay/bribe the media, to corrupt academia, to pay for illegal spying and to hire several law firms to bully yours truly among other critics.
Where are the European authorities/authoritarians? Where are all the French politicians? When will they understand that the EPO under Battistelli has become an enormous liability for their reputation? The UPC is an EU thing, unlike the EPO. It cannot go on like this; it’s highly damaging to Europe. A couple of days ago europa.eu published this programme from the Competitiveness Council (due to start tomorrow). See the part which says:
Any other business: (not in public session)
- Unitary Patent and Unified Patent Court
Is the EU hiding the fact that it promotes a ruinous conspiracy of law firms eager to shatter the European industry for the sake of legal bills? Will they listen to/learn why Spain, one of the largest EU economies, refuses to participate in UPC?
Apparently not…
“Will they listen to/learn why Spain, one of the largest EU economies, refuses to participate in UPC?”Going a little further back in time, we’re seeing Team UPC publicly promoting the lie that the UK is ready to participate (it cannot!) and articles that we missed at the time include this one from Roger Green (Watermark Intellectual Property), another one from WilmerHale (also published in the same lawyers’ sites at the time), and even this from ElectronicsWeekly (odd place to find such a thing). “Unitary Patents almost a reality,” says one headline. That’s untrue.
An article by Tim Wilson of Dehns (part of Team UPC) was published a couple of days ago under the title “The Value Of Patenting Software Innovation” (the overlap between UPC boosters and software patents lobbyists has been noted here for over half a decade). To quote Wilson:
Software is a relative new-comer to the patent arena. Over the last few decades, government patent offices have struggled to decide how to deal with software patents. There is a widely-held view that software simply can’t be patented, particularly in Europe. Fortunately, this is not at all correct: the right type of software innovation can most certainly be patented in all the world’s major patent offices.
Dehns Partner, Tim Wilson, recently hosted a seminar on this topic and provided strategies for maximising the prospects of getting a software patent successfully granted. Below is a summary of key points from the seminar, as well as examples of a few questions that came up.
“Yetserday IP Kat‘s Tian Lu promoted the lobbying event of patent extremists under the wing of the leading software patents lobbyist, the Intellectual Property Owners Association (IPO).”Also a couple of days ago there was this article by Charles Bond and John Coldham (Gowling WLG) about the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU), which Team UPC often relates to UPC, pretending that Brexit is somehow — miraculously enough — still compatible with UPC (it’s not).
Yetserday IP Kat‘s Tian Lu promoted the lobbying event of patent extremists under the wing of the leading software patents lobbyist, the Intellectual Property Owners Association (IPO). IPO’s 2018 European Practice Committee Conference, based on this first part of two, is a total farce. It’s also farcical based on who’s attending. No balance at all. They’re lobbying on 35 U.S.C. § 101, against PTAB, for software patents etc. Does Lu realise what (or whose) agenda she’s promoting?
“It cannot be stressed strongly enough that UPC would be a Trojan horse by which to bypass national laws forbidding software patents; Team UPC knows that and it’s one among many reasons it lobbies so hard for the UPC, oftentimes making up false statements in the process.”“On May 3rd,” she wrote, “the 2018 European Practice Committee Conference organized by IPO’s European Practice Committee took place at InterContinental Amstel Amsterdam, the much-loved landmark on the Amstel River banks with more than 150 years of elegance.”
A couple of days ago we also found this new “Newsletter” about Italy. “Software is not patentable in and of itself,” it says, but then it names the EPO’s tricks for bypassing the rule:
Software is not patentable in and of itself, as under Article 45 of the Industrial Property Code (and the corresponding Article 52 of the European Patent Convention) it belongs to a group of innovations that “are not considered as inventions”. As a result, a piece of software’s source code and its external appearance on a computer screen, rather than the ideas behind them, can be protected by copyright. However, Article 45 of the Industrial Property Code specifies that this scenario applies only if the software is “considered as such”. If the software is used in a new and inventive way to solve a technical problem that goes beyond the mere operation of the computer on which it is installed or in particular, is used to operate a machine or a system external to the computer (eg, a lighting system), it becomes patentable.
Further, when an invention consists of a concrete (and not purely abstract) scheme of links that allows a computer system to operate, this scheme becomes patentable. The European Patent Office guidelines state that:
“if the claim specifies computers, computer networks or other conventional programmable apparatus, a program therefor, or a storage medium carrying the program, for executing at least some steps of a scheme, it may comprise a mix of technical and non-technical features, with the technical features directed to a computer or a comparable programmed device. In these cases, the claim is to be examined as a ‘computer-implemented invention.”
Such a scheme is patentable under the usual conditions for all inventions – namely, where it is new, inventive, lawful, susceptible to industrial application and described in a way that allows an expert in the field to implement it. Italian case law has long recognised the validity of computer-implemented inventions. The landmark case in this regard is a 2004 decision regarding an online system for the rental of holiday homes by means of special software.
It cannot be stressed strongly enough that UPC would be a Trojan horse by which to bypass national laws forbidding software patents; Team UPC knows that and it’s one among many reasons it lobbies so hard for the UPC, oftentimes making up false statements in the process. Why is the media so silent about that? We have a rough idea. █
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