06.04.19

Gemini version available ♊︎

European Patent Quality Totally and Utterly Collapses While Team UPC Hopes It Can Make the Courts ‘Kangaroo’ Ones

Posted in Europe, Patents at 4:46 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Kangaroo court
Reference: Kangaroo court

Summary: The nightmarish situation at Europe’s second-largest institution is only getting worse; it fails to fulfill its sole and most fundamental function, which is patent examination; those who stand to gain from this failure are attempting to undermine courts themselves

THE situation at the European Patent Office (EPO) I find almost horrifying. What if it was me choosing to travel to Munich and work there as an examiner? Would I survive there? I’m not sure. They have lots of people with doctoral degrees and families; some choose to kill themselves (e.g. throwing themselves onto the train tracks or ending their life while on holiday, not to mention jumping outside the window while colleagues are working). It’s scary. Why is none of it being investigated?

There are more shocking details in EPO-FLIER No. 47, which we've just reposted. People are dying slowly by the thousands; their health rapidly deteriorates and they cannot sleep at night. They’re being bullied by Office management. They can’t do their work. They say that the EPC becomes meaningless as they’re not given enough time to actually comply with it and keep up with standards. It’s impossible. One has to ‘cheat’ and cut corners — violating the integrity of the profession (and personal dignity) — merely to survive at the Office.

Team UPC could not care less! To these greedy bunch of lawyers the more patents the EPO grants, the more money/business they’ll get. Yesterday “Kluwer Patent blogger” (we’re guessing Bristows based on past patterns) persisted with the illusion of UPC “progress”. It’s about ads for jobs that don’t exist — the same thing they did more than 3 years ago to promote the illusion that the UPC was just around the corner and a venue in the UK had been chosen (they recently used the same trick in France). To quote:

This is possible if the FCC throws out the complaint against German ratification of the UPCA, Germany completes the ratification of the UPCA and PPA, and one more member state signs or gives its support to the PPA.

No, there are other barriers. We wrote about these so many times before. One key problem is that today’s EPO offers no justice; giving it leverage over an actual court would be absolutely insane! Never mind if António Campinos already makes Battistelli a judge

These people (Team UPC and Team Battistelli/Campinos) have plans and it’s rather disturbing. They want to eliminate the judges’ scrutiny and bypass the rule of law with a bunch of ‘Kangaroo Courts’ (UPC) that are overzealous, plaintiff-friendly, embargo-centric and even raids-leaning (they can raid companies for merely being accused of infringement — an aspect we covered in the past). The above blog post contains little or no substance (corrective comments are not posted or are disallowed); it’s about a minor site change and Bristows (we assume) are so clueless that they don’t know how to take a screenshot of a page, they take a photograph of a monitor instead. Remember that months ago Bristows also cited some chatter about robes as so-called 'evidence' of progress. Bristows people are so prolific at lying that we recently made a wiki page/index just for them. We’ll soon see where else this chatter reaches… maybe IP Kat? Bristows staff is going to have a lot more control/power at IP Kat now that Rosie Burbidge is leaving. She said so yesterday. She was probably the most prolific/active author in the IP Kat blog in recent years (matched only by Bristows staff that promotes Bristows agenda in that blog). It’s not hard to see that when they stopped covering EPO truths people stopped caring/commenting. The number of comments has sunk almost tenfold since. It was a potentially informative blog, which shot itself in the paw when refusing to cover what people actually cared about and what mattered most. Battistelli’s friend from CIPA was occupying a key position in that blog when they decided to quit covering EPO scandals and then (a little later) to actually delete all comments on the subject. They were constantly grooming Campinos after he had already had his share of scandals in past employers.

We are very worried that almost nobody (except Barney Dixon) covers EPO scandals. There’s only one blogger who does this at Kluwer Patent Blog. Earlier this week we saw this press release from Nordic Nanovector ASA (NANO.OL). It was about a European Patent that had been granted. It’s one among so many (the number of granted patents nearly doubled in just a few years!) and even the EPO’s examiners admit this inevitable sharp decline in quality. It’s now alleged that the EPO granted yet another bogus patent that causes a lot of damage, as noted in this news article:

Shield Therapeutics PLC (LON:STX) has said it will continue to “robustly defend” its intellectual property (IP) after receiving notice that Teva Pharmaceutical Industries Ltd had appealed a ruling by the European Patent Office (EPO) regarding STX’s Feraccru iron deficiency treatment.

The news followed an EPO decision in March when it found in favour of Shield in relation to patent #2 668 175, which covers a “Process for preparing an iron hydroxypyrone”.

WATCH: Shield Therapeutics accelerating commercial plans ahead of FDA decision

Shield said no date for the appeal hearing had yet been set but it believed the initial EPO decision would be upheld and would update on proceedings as required.

This dispute is very profitable to lawyers, the likes of Team UPC. We will not be surprised at all if at the end of litigation (millions of dollars spent on lawyers) the underlying patent gets thrown out. Nobody is going to enjoy this as much as the lawyers and we expect a negative outcome based on most recent outcomes (European Patents drop like flies in European courts).

Yesterday the EPO tweeted: “You can talk to EPO experts about PATSTAT and/or get help from other users here” (linking to their forums for the first time in ages).

Don’t click. It’s embarrassing. These forums are still a ghost town. Nothing happens there. Nobody posts anything, except maybe once in a few weeks/months. I responded to this tweet by saying that EPO experts, including veterans/experienced EPO staff, have long ago left/retired early. The EPO now hires people with very low qualification levels. This means further reduction in patent quality as much effort gets pumped into training and many won’t pass probation and outlast 5 years of a temporary contract. Does the EPO want any examiners? At all? Does it want judges and courts? Sometimes it feels like their fascination with the “AI” hype means they’d rather just grant a patent for every application and somehow automate prosecution. We’re not kidding and SUEPO wrote something to that effect several years ago.

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 28/05/2023: eGates System Collapses, More High TCO Stories (Microsoft Windows)

    Links for the day



  2. IRC Proceedings: Saturday, May 27, 2023

    IRC logs for Saturday, May 27, 2023



  3. No More Twitter, Mastodon, and Diaspora for Tux Machines (Goodbye to Social Control Media)

    People would benefit from mass abandonment of such pseudo-social pseudo-media.



  4. Links 28/05/2023: New Wine and More

    Links for the day



  5. Links 27/05/2023: Plans Made for GNU's 40th Anniversary

    Links for the day



  6. Social Control Media Needs to be Purged and We Need to Convince Others to Quit It Too (to Protect Ourselves as Individuals and as a Society)

    With the Tux Machines anniversary (19 years) just days away we seriously consider abandoning all social control media accounts of that site, including Mastodon and Diaspora; social control networks do far more harm than good and they’ve gotten a lot worse over time



  7. Anonymously Travelling: Still Feasible?

    The short story is that in the UK it's still possible to travel anonymously by bus, tram, and train (even with shades, hat and mask/s on), but how long for? Or how much longer have we got before this too gets banned under the false guise of "protecting us" (or "smart"/"modern")?



  8. With EUIPO in Focus, and Even an EU Kangaroo Tribunal, EPO Corruption (and Cross-Pollination With This EU Agency) Becomes a Major Liability/Risk to the EU

    With the UPC days away (an illegal and unconstitutional kangaroo court system, tied to the European Union in spite of critical deficiencies) it’s curious to see EPO scandals of corruption spilling over to the European Union already



  9. European Patent Office (EPO) Management Not Supported by the EPO's Applicants, So Why Is It Still There?

    This third translation in the batch is an article similar to the prior one, but the text is a bit different (“Patente ohne Wert”)



  10. EPO Applicants Complain That Patent Quality Sank and EPO Management Isn't Listening (Nor Caring)

    SUEPO has just released 3 translations of new articles in German (here is the first of the batch); the following is the second of the three (“Kritik am Europäischen Patentamt – Patente ohne Wert?”)



  11. German Media About Industry Patent Quality Charter (IPQC) and the European Patent Office (EPO)

    SUEPO has just released 3 translations of new articles in German; this is the first of the three (“Industrie kritisiert Europäisches Patentamt”)



  12. Geminispace Continues to Grow Even If (or When) Stéphane Bortzmeyer Stops Measuring Its Growth

    A Gemini crawler called Lupa (Free/libre software) has been used for years by Stéphane Bortzmeyer to study Gemini and report on how the community was evolving, especially from a technical perspective; but his own instance of Lupa has produced no up-to-date results for several weeks



  13. Links 27/05/2023: Goodbyes to Tina Turner

    Links for the day



  14. HMRC: You Can Click and Type to Report Crime, But No Feedback or Reference Number Given

    The crimes of Sirius ‘Open Source’ were reported 7 days ago to HMRC (equivalent to the IRS in the US, more or less); but there has been no visible progress and no tracking reference is given to identify the report



  15. IRC Proceedings: Friday, May 26, 2023

    IRC logs for Friday, May 26, 2023



  16. One Week After Sirius Open Source Was Reported to HM Revenue and Customs (HMRC) for Tax Fraud: No Response, No Action, Nothing...

    One week ago we reported tax abuses of Sirius ‘Open Source’ to HMRC; we still wait for any actual signs that HMRC is doing anything at all about the matter (Sirius has British government clients, so maybe they’d rather not look into that, in which case HMRC might be reported to the Ombudsman for malpractice)



  17. Links 26/05/2023: Weston 12.0 Highlights and US Debt Limit Panic

    Links for the day



  18. Gemini Links 26/05/2023: New People in Gemini

    Links for the day



  19. IRC Proceedings: Thursday, May 25, 2023

    IRC logs for Thursday, May 25, 2023



  20. Links 26/05/2023: Qt 6.5.1 and Subsystems in GNUnet

    Links for the day



  21. Links 25/05/2023: Mesa 23.1.1 and Debian Reunion

    Links for the day



  22. Links 25/05/2023: IBM as Leading Wayland Pusher

    Links for the day



  23. IRC Proceedings: Wednesday, May 24, 2023

    IRC logs for Wednesday, May 24, 2023



  24. Links 25/05/2023: Istio 1.16.5 and Curl 8.1.1

    Links for the day



  25. Gemini Links 25/05/2023: On Profit and Desire for Gemini

    Links for the day



  26. SiliconANGLE: Sponsored by Microsoft and Red Hat to Conduct the Marriage Ceremony

    SiliconANGLE insists that paying SiliconANGLE money for coverage does not lead to bias, but every sane person who keeps abreast of SiliconANGLE — and I read their entire feed every day — knows that it’s a ludicrous lie (Red Hat/IBM and the Linux Foundation also buy puff pieces and “event coverage” from SiliconANGLE, so it’s marketing disguised as “journalism”



  27. Links 24/05/2023: Podman Desktop 1.0, BSDCan 2024, and More

    Links for the day



  28. Gemini Links 24/05/2023: Razors, Profit, and More

    Links for the day



  29. [Meme] When the Patent Office Controls Kangaroo Patent Courts and Judges

    The EPO has been hijacked by industry and its lobbyists; now the same is happening to EU patent courts, even though it is illegal and unconstitutional



  30. The Illegally 'Revised' Unified Patent Court Agreement (UPCA) is Disgracing the Perception of Law and Order in the European Union

    The Unified Patent Court (UPC) isn’t legal, the Unified Patent Court Agreement (UPCA) is being altered on the fly (by a person patently ineligible to do so), and so it generally looks like even patent courts across Europe might soon become as corrupt as the European Patent Office, which has no basis in the Rule of the Law and is basically just a front for large corporations (most of them aren’t even European)


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