04.16.19
Corporate Media Will Never Cover the EPO’s Violations of the Law With Respect to Patent Scope
EPO management is giving out patents it knows to be bunk, invalid
They would patent ‘special’ water and air too (if it wouldn’t have caused backlash)
Summary: The greed-driven gold rush for patents has resulted in a large pool of European Patents that have no legitimacy and are nowadays associated with low legal certainty; the media isn’t interested in covering such a monumental disaster that poses a threat to the whole of Europe
THE domain of patents rarely receives media coverage; it’s certainly uncommon in Europe. There are some ads (for law firms) disguised as ‘news’, but lawyers and attorneys aren’t journalists and their ‘coverage’ or ‘columns’ are just shameless self-promotion and lobbying. It’s all about money.
“They continue to spam Scottish media, marketing European Patents under the guise of Brexit ‘news’.”Here’s a new example from yesterday. HeraldScotland published this fake ‘article’ from “Graham Murnane [who] is a qualified UK and European Patent Attorney based in Murgitroyd’s Glasgow office.”
So a Scottish patent law firm is at it again. They continue to spam Scottish media, marketing European Patents under the guise of Brexit ‘news’. Remember last week’s example from Marks & Clerk, which used another Scottish paper to insult Scotland and urge people to pursue patents at Marks & Clerk? It was far from the first time. They had done it before in Scottish media — a fact that we documented in articles such as:
- Marks & Clerk is Still Pushing Patent Maximalism Agenda in Europe and Britain, Including UPC/UPCA/Unitary Patent (UP)
- Marks & Clerk Blames Battistelli’s Victims, the Boards of Appeal, Whose Job Guarded Patent Quality
- Software Patents Are a Dying Breed, So Marks & Clerk and Other Legal Monoliths Promote the EPO’s Buzzwords (Loopholes)
- UPC Puff Piece in the Scottish Media is Just an Advertisement by Marks & Clerk
The latest puff piece says this:
In these times of change in relation to many things European, one thing that won’t change is how businesses protect their innovations.
A lot of people are surprised when I tell them that the UK is, and will continue to be, part of the European Patent Office (EPO).
The EPO is not an EU institution, so whatever happens to our relationship with the EU, the UK will continue to be an EPO member state.
Well, duh. How is that even news? But how valid would the patents be in the UK? They aim for quantity now, not quality.
Yesterday the EPO wrote: “The Maltese and Moroccan #patent registers are now available via deep links from the European Patent Register.”
As if there’s much of value (in the patents sense) to be found there. The EPO just wants to add all countries to its group/syndication, much like NATO, rendering nobody safe from litigation with fake European Patents (or attacks from Russia in NATO’s case).
“They aim for quantity now, not quality.”When we speak of fake European Patents we mean European Patents that would not survive a court’s scrutiny and must therefore not be granted in the first place. Even SUEPO (Staff Union of the European Patent Office) recently complained about these.
The EPO is again boasting about software patents and applications (“Europe has witnessed a marked upturn in blockchain patent filing since 2015, with more than two thirds of applications being filed at the EPO,” the EPO wrote yesterday). European software patents called “blockchain” are not valid and that’s what these are; they’re just software patents, by the EPO's own admission. António Campinos promotes this nonsense in his “blog”, so he too is personally culpable. Will all these patents fall in an avalanche some time soon? Maybe.
“Will all these patents fall in an avalanche some time soon? Maybe.”A firm that mentioned it before (as we noted at the time regarding judges’ lack of impartiality) had posted about it in its own site, perhaps realising just how realistic the prospect is (that software patents would all be invalidated). Haven’t we learned from what happened a few weeks ago in the UK Supreme Court?
Mondaq has this fresh copy of an article by Gordon Harris and Paul Inman (Gowling WLG) on fake European Patents i.e. patents EPO granted only to be found invalid by British courts. In their own words:
On the other hand, Lord Hodge considered it well established that although not bound to do so, the courts in the UK “should normally follow the settled jurisprudence for the EPO (especially decisions of its Enlarged Board of Appeal) on the interpretation of the European Patent Convention in the interests of uniformity, especially when the question is one of principle”.
Today’s European Patents are very dubious and even EPO staff complains about these. SUEPO estimates that tens of thousands of fake European Patents are being granted every year (non-compliant w.r.t. EPC). █
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