"How long can the EPO grant patents on nature, life, maths and even food without the public retaliating?"The EPO doesn't speak about "software patents"; it uses all sorts of sneaky buzzwords such as "AI". One can see Bristows LLP staff getting slapped down for spreading "AI" hype and lies a few days ago. To quote the comment: "Stop taking us for simple minds and define something as being intelligent which actually only is something defined by a programmer."
We used to write a lot of articles about this "AI" hype and how it relates to patents. We no longer do this as it would seem repetitive. Last week Bastian Best wrote: "AI and patents: Does the @EPOorg grant software patents for text document classifiers?"
Those classifiers aren't "AI" but algorithms; The EPO will typically grant software patents if one calls them "AI", however, so Best's colleague Patrick Heckeler wrote (without invoking this buzzwords nonsense) that it is considered "non-technical", as per the Board:
As a result, the Board ruled that a the claimed mathematical algorithm does not contribute to the technial character of the claimed method. The only implementation features specified in the claim are references to the method being “computerized” and the text documents being “digitally represented in a computer”. The skilled person, when given the task of implementing the algorithm, would certainly have chosen to represent text documents “digitally in a computer”. The Board further considers that the skilled person, using only his common general knowledge, would have had
Sisvel has announced that it is launching a new platform which will license patents reading on the VP9 video encoding format, made available by Google in June 2013, and the AV1 (AOMedia Video 1) open video coding format developed by the Alliance for Open Media (a consortium founded in 2015 by Apple, ARM, Cisco, Facebook, Google, IBM, Intel, Microsoft, Mozilla and Netflix), the first version of which was released in June 2018.
Both VP9 and AV1 have been described as royalty free, but Sisvel claims that there are a number of innovators whose patent protected inventions have been implemented by the codecs.
As a cross-jurisdictional patent litigation watcher I can tell that injunctive relief is what attracts plaintiffs to Germany more than anything else. That's why they tend to play the lottery: they assert a bunch of patents, most of which tend to be weak, just in hopes of securing an injunction that allows them to settle an entire dispute on their preferred terms. Until the Court of Justice of the EU handed down its Huawei v. ZTE opinion, it was hard to avoid injunctive relief in Germany even over standard-essential patents (SEPs).
This may change, and I'm one of those who hope it will. Last week I attended a really great conference entitled "Enforcing Patents Smoothly--From Automatic Injunctions to Proportionate Remedies" that was organized and hosted by the Friedrich Alexander University of Erlangen-Nuremberg, where academics, practitioners, and a Mannheim judge (Presiding Judge Dr. Peter Tochtermann) discussed this subject. I wish to thank Professor Franz Hofmann for chairing this conference, and the ip2innovate industry body for supporting it. It clearly exceeded my expectations. At that conference I learned about a legislative initiative in Germany that appears to be in its embryonic stages.
Meanwhile I've obtained official confirmation from the Federal Ministry of Justice and Consumer Protection of Germany that an "expert talk" will take place on May 20, 2019, for the stated purpose of preparing a legislative initiative in the area of intellectual property policy. Industyr groups, academics and judges will discuss one of the potential elements of said initiative: a potential reform of the legal framework governing patent injunctions, particularly in connection with SEPs and, more generally, complex products.
All of the presentations at the Erlangen conference were great, and most of them would actually deserve to be discussed in greater detail, which I may do at a different point in time. What I do wish to share here is the impression that those advocating a more eBay-like approach in Germany, which would require some proportionality principle to be enshrined in statutory law, likely have far more political clout than those opposing it. And they have EU law on their side: the IP enforcement directive comes with a proportionality paragraph, just that Germany transposed it into national law only in connection with other types of intellectual property rights than patents.
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Professor Christian Osterrieth, one of the name partners of the Reimann Osterrieth Köhler Haft (ROKH) firm that is now part of Hoyng Rokh Monegier, explained how eye-opening it was for him to see a case in which a single patent covering a secondary aspect of a technology could have had disruptive impact on Germany's highway toll collection system. The way Professor Osterrieth described the problem was reminiscent of Justice Kennedy's famous and influential eBay concurrence.
Professor Hofmann made a more theoretical argument for greater flexibility. Professor Thomas Cotter (University of Minnesota, and author of the Comparative Patent Remedies blog that I've recommended on various occasions) focused on the economics of patent injunctions. Simply put, injunctive relief creates a situation in which the parties will negotiate a price, and a court-determined ongoing royalty would be another, so the key question is which approach results in a more reasonable valuation. It's about avoiding overcompensation as well as undercompensation.
The biggest Dutch trade union federation FNV is poised to cut its workforce by almost 20% or 400 full and part-time jobs, the Volkskrant said on Friday.
Membership numbers are declining and this is forcing the union to make cuts totalling €16m a year, the paper said. It bases its claim on the plan to reorganise the union’s operations.