Shen (SIPO), Lutz, Battistelli, and Lamy at the end of 2016 in Saint-Germain-en-Laye



Summary: The EPO is being transformed into 'SIPO Europe' [1, 2], a dangerous gamble which would leave European firms more susceptible to frivolous litigation and generally reduce the value of previously-much-coveted European Patents

THE number of patents granted by the USPTO is declining. That's not a bad thing; what's most important is the quality of granted patents. The opposite thing is happening at the EPO and based on the internal EPO communications/memos, António Campinos is perfectly happy to automate patent examination tasks and still increase so-called 'production', even by means that examiners warned about (it's easy to work around or bypass algorithm-based prior art searches).

"Software patents in Europe were always our foremost concern and there’s no sign of them stopping."This is a disaster in the making, but the Outsourcer in Chief Campinos doesn't seem to mind. He's copying China. Less than a day ago we saw recognition of the fact that China nowadays grants truly appalling patents. The EPO now goes down the same route...

"SIPO’s stats for the first half of 2018 highlight growth in patent filings but practitioners are concerned about quality," Karry Lai wrote from Hong Kong in a patent maximalists' site. Meanwhile, according to an ad from Watchtroll (posted yesterday), "USPTO Seeks Senior Counsel for China Intellectual Property Policy".

Software patents in Europe were always our foremost concern and there's no sign of them stopping. In fact, the EPO was promoting software patents less than a day ago when it wrote: "Régis Quélavoine, a director in Mobility and Mechatronics at the EPO, will discuss patenting computer-implemented inventions and artificial intelligence at the EPO at this event in Chicago..."

And then (on the same afternoon) the EPO 'dressed up' software patents as "artificial intelligence" when it wrote: "Over 350 experts from industry, academia, patent law firms and national patent offices attended the first-ever event on the impact of #artificialintelligence on the patent system."

Worryingly enough, these sorts of tweets have become very frequent since Campinos took over (maybe more frequent than back in the Battistelli days). ⬆