Posted in Europe, Patents at 2:15 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: The EPO is making it virtually impossible to stop the illicit patenting of algorithms; even the EU nowadays participates in this EPC-violating agenda
THE European Patent Office (EPO) and the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) don’t seem to mind patent quality. Iancu and Campinos (like Battistelli before him) openly promote software patents in defiance of caselaw. They leave these for the courts to invalidate — to essentially void patents that should have never been granted in the first place. Iancu attacks Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB) inter partes reviews (IPRs), whereas Battistelli and Campinos ensure that EPO judges lack independence and autonomy. Iancu ignores all the Federal Circuit rulings that don’t suit his agenda/vendetta, whereas the EPO never seems to bother with decisions outside Munich (Munich?! Oops, we meant Haar).
The EPO under Campinos is still breaking the law and violating the EPC. Its latest buildings ‘shuffle’ is alleged to be — perhaps deliberately — making it a lot harder to return judges from ‘exile’ in Haar. It is still a growing headache for Campinos as bringing back these judges would prove that Battistelli (the man who gave him this job) broke the law and potentially void/discredit several years’ worth of court cases.
Gwilym Roberts from Kilburn & Strode (via Peter Ling) has just mentioned one key case to that effect:
When this Kat took on the pending referral G2/19 before the EPO Enlarged Board of Appeal to dwell on issues of geography in the greater Munich area, he mentioned that the same referral could warrant several additional Katposts to cover all the issues raised. Kat friend Gwilym Roberts from Kilburn & Strode took up the challenge and has had a closer look into the two other questions referred to the EBA.
[...]
The case background is simple – a third party unsuccessfully submitted observations on clarity (art. 84 EPC) prior to grant of a patent application. Because the third party could not oppose based on art. 84 (because lack of clarity is nott a ground), instead it lodged an appeal against the grant of the patent on the basis that it was adversely affected. This is extraordinary.
The issues referred are, roughly: (1) should oral proceedings be held to deal with the admissibility of the appeal, (2) does the complainer have standing as appellant and (3) the Haar thing. Question (1) has been looked at before (see for example T556/09, T114/09, T1289/10), but it would seem to open the door to frivolous abuse of proceedings. As long as the inadmissibility rules are applied responsibly, which seems to be the case generally (and it does not appear to be the subject of the complaint here), then there has to be a way of dismissing vexatious cases promptly.
It’s worrying to see that there’s still no resolution to it; in the meantime the EPO continues granting perhaps hundreds of thousands of patents that should not be granted. And retweeted by EPO some hours ago was this tweet from the EU: “Be quick and register TODAY! The next study visit to the European Patent Office ( @EPOorg) (27 June 2019, Munich) will focus on Artificial Intelligence and patents including hands-on experience of EPO experts, patent examiners and lawyers!”
Well, Artificial Intelligence or “AI” disguises invalid patents on algorithms. Here’s what the cited page from the EU says:
In particular, this study visit will focus on Artificial Intelligence and patents. Additionally to providing the participants with an overview of the EPO and the European patent system, it will guide them into the complex field of AI-based inventions and the new problems they may pose to the examiners on their way from a patent application to a granted patent.
So “complex field of AI-based inventions” (yes, very complex!) is how the EPO looks to justify granting fake European Patents. Notice the EU’s complicity? Didn’t Parliament pass a directive against it? Law does not seem to matter anymore. █
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Posted in Free/Libre Software, FUD, GNU/Linux, Microsoft at 1:16 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Table of Contents
Introduction: Cover and quick Introduction [PDF]
Chapter 1: Know your enemies– Act like a friend [PDF]
Chapter 2: Work with the system– Use OEMs and your legal team [PDF]
Chapter 3: Playing the victim– Show the world that too much freedom hurts development [PDF]
Chapter 4: You get what you pay for– Getting skeptics to work for you [PDF]
Chapter 5: Open Source Judo– How to bribe the moderates to your side [PDF]
You are here ☞ Chapter 6: Damning with faint praise– Take the right examples of free software and exploit them for everything [PDF]
Chapter 7: Patent War– Use low-quality patents to prove that all software rips off your company
Chapter 8: A foot in the door– how to train sympathetic developers and infiltrate other projects
Chapter 9: Ownership through Branding– Change the names, and change the world
Chapter 10: Moving forward– Getting the best results from Open source with your monopoly
You might not believe me if I tell you that we decide what “cool” means, unless you look at the results in real life. We have the press working for us, we have open source doing what we need even as they believe they are fighting us. We can keep the press obedient in exchange for access, we can enjoy allegiance from open source from other deals that we make.
If our research shows that something is cool, we buy it or we produce it. One thing you can’t do is make the same thing look cool forever. No matter how happy some customers are, or how much they rely on our software, we are still going to lead them away from one thing and towards another– it isn’t just because it’s better; it’s because if we let them rely on what they already have, we won’t get to sell them anything new.
Now with cloudware, we control the access to the software. But it is still necessary for people to perceive that we are working to make improvements. The most convincing way to do this is to keep chasing what’s new– and dragging people from one thing to the next.
Once again we do this as friends, with a carrot of features and not just the stick of walled access and fees. We aren’t just forcing people to pay, but leading them to want their subscriptions and feel good about them. We make promises about the new features being useful, but we also need the press and our marketing to make our products cool. No matter how much of a monopoly we work to maintain, there are other companies out there looking to create something before we can. We need to be sure we own and control it– otherwise, it belongs to them.
Another great thing about what’s new is that people don’t know anything about it. We can write our own narrative about new products, and until enough people gain access and knowledge (and preferably first-hand experience) they can’t say very much about the product that we can say twice as much about. New products let us run circles around people who claim to know about them– they give us a unique advantage.
As for lack of familiarity, we can actually use that to increase interest rather than lose business. If the product is attractive enough, we can use the people who are familiar with it against the people who aren’t, and make the latter look like they are ignorant if they are unfamiliar with our product line. So the incentive to do business is to continue to appear knowledgeable. This tactic works notably well among enthusiasts and professionals.
If you ask people to define “cool,” they can’t always come up with something concrete. But you don’t have to be a cool person at all to know what definition of “cool” matters to us– “cool” is what’s new and what people want. That’s as cool as we will ever need to be. That’s what keeps us where we are, and everyone else where they are. And that’s what we have to keep control of, if we want to stay where we are.
On the other side of the coin we have what’s not cool: stuff that’s not new, or stuff that people don’t want. That’s what we have to avoid offering– if that’s all we have, we need to buy or develop new things to offer.
A superior product is like a politician’s speech– the best way to sell a lie is to put a truth in it, so people assume the rest of it is also the truth. And when you want to sell a new product you can do the same thing: start with a feature people are desperate to have, and you can build a lot of garbage around it as long as the important features are satisfying enough.
It should be more than obvious that some of these features– even some of the best features– are going to be proprietary. So it becomes imperative if we are going to compete with and also infiltrate open source that we need to loosen the hold that free software has on the narrative.
A schism can be hashed out and resolved– what we want is to widen it to a chasm and actually hand the reins of free software over to open source, so that all “open source” is forever a way to steer people towards our features.
Everything cool (that we care about) is new and wanted, and everything uncool is old and boring and standard. To keep churning out cooler, newer products (not always cool like Apple, sometimes just cool like an update with a few new features) we need to use our shills to show everyone how uncool the alternatives are. As long as we look cool and friendly, people will be reluctant to care that we need to go after our competition in this way. After all, cool is also about winning, and winning means someone loses somewhere.
By the time people are convinced that our competitors aren’t cool, they won’t want to side with them anymore and won’t defend them from us.
We need to turn rich against poor, as mentioned two chapters ago– and we need to turn inexperienced users against experienced ones, to prevent skeptics from handing down their stories to potential customers. It is essential to paint seasoned experts as gray and irrelevant, as has-beens who don’t understand the genius of our new offerings. And it is essential to paint every tool we used to offer or never offered as outdated and obsolete.
When dealing with open source, the most important person to paint as a has-been is Richard Stallman. He and Gates are decades-long rivals, diametrically opposed to each other in their philosophies. But more relevant is that he leads the movement that opposes us– we need to keep open source on our side, and lead them further away from free software.
Fortunately, Stallman and his followers are tightly-knit in their ideology. Attacking any of them is like attacking all of them– we can play up their hacker style as social ineptitude, their adherence (where it exists) to standards and interoperability as a refusal to evolve, their playful culture as a refusal to grow up and be professional, and their self-reliance and independence as being non-team-players and even toxic masculinity.
Their hacker philosophy is about putting certain values first– just as we use new features to get people to accept new flaws that we can promise to fix later (and then say that we have a greater commitment to security) and use open source to bring people to our exclusive software lines, we can use their values to steer the next generation of customers (and critics) towards a more corporate culture.
Any social values that we are saddled with keeping up appearances about in the workplace, we can instill through open source and then claim the rest are not putting enough emphasis on. Of course, some of these values are good values in and of themselves. But as much as we have “social value theater” in the workplace and have to play along, we can dump the same corporate culture onto anyone who will call it professionalism, and then say everyone else is just unprofessional and toxic.
In the short run we can use this against Stallman and his organization, but in the long run we can even use this to shackle Linus and gradually push him out the door. In our culture, it doesn’t pay to be eccentric except when it makes us billions– get with the program or get out. A leader that isn’t making us money is a leader who has let us down, and we need to get rid of them as quickly as possible.
The values of free software developers and the values of free software itself go hand in hand. We need to denigrate most of their software, along the same lines that we denigrate the people who create it. As said over and over, we need to rely on shills, fans, and “useful third parties” to denigrate these people and their work. We also need a “path forward” to our products. Whenever we outline our strategies to feed to our shills and the tech press, they need to paint free software and its authors as true gems– from a bygone era.
“Yes, that was really great. But now, it’s time to look to the future.”
The future is (always) us, and the products we want people to use. There’s no rise in quarterly revenue for tried-and-trusted, except when it’s merely the glue holding our new products together.
Relevant quotes from the Halloween documents:
“OSS poses a direct, short-term revenue and platform threat to Microsoft — particularly in server space. Additionally, the intrinsic parallelism and free idea exchange in OSS has benefits that are not replicable with our current licensing model and therefore present a long term developer mindshare threat.”
“However, other OSS process weaknesses provide an avenue for Microsoft to garner advantage in key feature areas such as architectural improvements (e.g. storage+), integration (e.g. schemas), ease-of-use, and organizational support.”
“OSS process vitality is directly tied to the Internet”
“The OSS process is unique in its participants’ motivations and the resources that can be brought to bare down on problems. OSS, therefore, has some
interesting, non-replicable assets which should be thoroughly understood.”
“Open source software has roots in the hobbyist and the scientific community and was typified by ad hoc exchange of source code by developers/users.”
“Credit for the first instance of modern, organized OSS is generally given to Richard Stallman of MIT. In late 1983, Stallman created the Free Software
Foundation (FSF) — http://www.gnu.ai.mit.edu/fsf/fsf.html — with the goal of creating a free version of the UNIX operating system.”
“Commercial software development processes are hallmarked by organization around economic goals. However, since money is often not the (primary) motivation behind Open Source Software, understanding the nature of the threat posed requires a deep understanding of the process and motivation of Open Source development teams.”
“In other words, to understand how to compete against OSS, we must target a process rather than a company.”
“These individuals are more like hobbyists spending their free time / energy on OSS project development while maintaining other full time jobs. This has begun to change somewhat as commercial versions of the Linux OS have appeared.”
“Coordination of an OSS team is extremely dependent on Internet-native forms of collaboration.”
“OSS projects the size of Linux and Apache are only viable if a large enough community of highly skilled developers can be amassed to attack a problem.”
“Common goals are the equivalent of vision statements which permeate the distributed decision making for the entire development team. A single, clear
directive (e.g. “recreate UNIX”) is far more efficiently communicated and acted upon by a group than multiple, intangible ones”
“Because the entire Linux community has years of shared experience dealing with many other forms of UNIX, they are easily able to discern — in a non-confrontational manner — what worked and what didn’t.”
“Having historical, 20:20 hindsight provides a strong, implicit structure. In more forward looking organizations, this structure is provided by strong, visionary leadership.”
“Raymond posits that developers are more likely to reuse code in a rigorous open source process than in a more traditional development environment because they are always guaranteed access to the entire source all the time.”
“Treating your users as co-developers is your least-hassle route to rapid code improvement and effective debugging.”
“Release early. Release often. And listen to your customers.”
“Because the developers are typically hobbyists, the ability to `fund’ multiple, competing efforts is not an issue and the OSS process benefits from the ability to pick the best potential implementation out of the many produced.”
“Universities are some of the original proponents of OSS as a teaching tool.”
“Linus Torvalds is a celebrity in the Linux world and his decisions are considered final. By contrast, a similar celebrity leader did NOT exist for the BSD-derived efforts.”
“What are the core strengths of OSS products that Microsoft needs to be concerned with?”
“The single biggest constraint faced by any OSS project is finding enough developers interested in contributing their time towards the project. As an
enabler, the Internet was absolutely necessary to bring together enough people for an Operating System scale project.”
“Like commercial software, the most viable single OSS project in many categories will, in the long run, kill competitive OSS projects and `acquire’ their IQ assets. For example, Linux is killing BSD Unix and has absorbed most of its core ideas (as well as ideas in the commercial UNIXes).”
“One of the most interesting implications of viable OSS ecosystems is long-term credibility.”
“Long term credibility exists if there is no way you can be driven out of business in the near term. This forces change in how competitors deal with you.”
“a product/process is long-term credible if FUD tactics can not be used to combat it.”
“OSS systems are considered credible because the source code is available from potentially millions of places and individuals.”
“The likelihood that Apache will cease to exist is orders of magnitudes lower than the likelihood that WordPerfect, for example, will disappear. The
disappearance of Apache is not tied to the disappearance of binaries (which are affected by purchasing shifts, etc.) but rather to the disappearance of source code and the knowledge base.“
“Inversely stated, customers know that Apache will be around 5 years from now — provided there exists some minimal sustained interested from its
user/development community.”
“The GPL and its aversion to code forking reassures customers that they aren’t riding an evolutionary `dead-end’ by subscribing to a particular commercial version of Linux.”
“The “evolutionary dead-end” is the core of the software FUD argument.”
From https://antitrust.slated.org/halloween/halloween1.html █
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Posted in Deception, Europe, Patents at 7:24 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
An undemocratic patent conspiracy (UPC)
EPO Presidents Campinos and Battistelli together with Barnier, three UPC boosters who are French and support software patents in Europe
Summary: Attempts to change the law in Europe (or bypass patent courts, constitutions and national laws) have culminated in the truly absurd state we see at the EPO, which is more eager to grant low-quality patents (than ever before) and doesn’t even mind its own reputation
TEAM UPC, Bristows LLP in particular, has not completely given up. Not just yet. This is becoming laughable and it will tarnish their reputation because it’s very clear that they consciously and deliberately lie, leading to erosion of trust and longterm harm to credibility. But we’ll bite anyway…
“…Team UPC is once again advertising jobs that very likely will never exist (and definitely don’t exist at the moment)…”So yesterday Alan Johnson (Bristows, one of their most frequent liars) published something titled “UPC Preparatory Committee re-opens judicial recruitment process”. After some UPC fluff in IP Kat and Kluwer Patent Blog Bristows now uses its own blog to skip the indirection. It’s the first blog post in a very long time and they barely write anything this year (sometimes the silence lasts several months). We already responded to this several days ago; Team UPC is once again advertising jobs that very likely will never exist (and definitely don’t exist at the moment), just like they did around 2015. Is this even legal? How long can this charade go on for? Certainly there are laws against false advertising. Anyway…
“Elsewhere in ‘the news’ this week we see little or nothing about the UPC, i.e. the usual in 2019 and in 2018.”Moving on a bit, there’s this fake new ‘article’ (advert disguised as an article) which spreads several serious lies (a few paragraphs down) about the UPC. We debunked these so many times before (many dozens of times), but we suppose that this is considered acceptable because nowadays journalism is dead and lawyers have been reduced to liars, the media has been reduced to their mouthpiece (especially in the domain of patents, where many supposed ‘news’ sites are themselves fully owned by law firms). This ‘article’ comes from World Intellectual Property Review (WIPR), which no longer employs some of its better writers who covered EPO scandals. Have any workers at the EPO wondered why WIPR becomes more like WIPO over time? I heard some stories about WIPR and it’s not pretty. They’re very close to the EPO’s management — far more than anyone ought to be. And remember who subscribes to WIPR, i.e. who the clients are. If their writers cover issues like EPO crimes — unlike PR — then it’s “not good for business” (or the “customers” — the subscribers) and you can ultimately get sacked. People are rewarded or promoted for complicity.
Elsewhere in ‘the news’ this week we see little or nothing about the UPC, i.e. the usual in 2019 and in 2018. But earlier this week we saw ResearchAndMarkets bringing together liars from “the EPO, WIPO, UPC Preparatory Committee…” (ResearchAndMarkets is one of those marketing firms/power brokers that advertise themselves as ‘analysts’, ‘consultants’ etc.)
Is ResearchAndMarkets selling ‘access’? It charges those who attend to be lied to (the business model is lobbying) and says this: “The event is very participative, providing plenty of time for open questions and round table discussions with the experts. It also offers a chance to learn about procedural issues and the practical aspects of the EPO, WIPO and USPTO, and how developments at the Unitary Patent Court will impact on you. [...] The speakers come directly from the EPO, WIPO, UPC Preparatory Committee and the USA…”
“Once the funding runs out for these liars they suddenly sound so much different.”ResearchAndMarkets does several pro-EPO (as in, EPO management) events that promote software patents, overzealous litigation, the UPC and so on. It’s worth exploring who’s behind it. This isn’t about information and education but pure lobbying. Managing IP and IAM do a lot of such lobbying; they occasionally set up pro-UPC events, sometimes with financial ‘aid’ from the EPO. And speaking of IAM, here is what it wrote yesterday: “The saga of the Unitary Patent System and Unified Patent Court’s implementation – and the effect of Brexit on this – has created uncertainty for practitioners across Europe.”
They mean patent lawyers and patent trolls; not “practitioners” but parasites/predators. The term “practitioners” makes or helps people who produce nothing sound “productive”. A lot of so-called “practices” are merely practicing taxation, predation and extortion.
IAM’s business model is lying to the public. The patent trolls pay IAM for this ‘service’. IAM used to block me in Twitter for merely pointing that out politely. On April 1st they posted this tweet:
Several months ago even IAM itself admitted that it had lied (or was 'wrong') about the UPC. Once the funding runs out for these liars they suddenly sound so much different. █
“Unitary”?
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Posted in Europe, Patents at 7:11 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
The European Patent Office (EPO) popularised some lies and even paid the media (publishers) to promote these lies; nowadays academia participates in it (for EPO cash).
“EPO objective for 2023 is to spread its harmful practice to grant software patents to other countries, through the IP5 (USPTO, EPO, JPO, KIPO, CIPO)” –Benjamin Henrion, as cited here
Summary: The nefarious agenda of the litigation lobby (lowering patent quality to make lawsuits abundant) is spreading across the world partly thanks to the work of Team Battistelli (now Team Campinos, who takes it up another notch); it’s as if patent offices aren’t about examination and assessment anymore because the work becomes more clerical and judgment cursory at best
THE toxic culture bred and spread by the tenants of the EPO’s higher floors (the Management Team, enabled by cruel sociopaths at the Administrative Council) will damage the world even after departures. Earlier this week we added wiki pages for Raimund Lutz and Željko Topić, whom we are still watching (arrest is still a possibility). There are several connections to WIPO's scandals as well (some of these people have multiple hats). Benoît Battistelli tried to become WIPO’s chief and he is reportedly still hoping to become the UPC’s chief (António Campinos already makes Battistelli a judge). Qualifications aren’t necessary, only a taste (and waste) for expensive wines and other recreational drugs.
“Qualifications aren’t necessary, only a taste (and waste) for expensive wines and other recreational drugs.”These people ignore the EPC and have devised some buzzwords and weasel words that they spread to the USPTO to dodge 35 U.S.C. § 101/Alice (SCOTUS). Months ago the UN/WIPO jumped on the “AI” bandwagon/hype wave (because many patents on algorithms are now being rebranded “HEYYYY HIIIII!”). New names and buzzwords for old and invalid software patents in Europe? You bet! And it’s not limited to the EPO anymore; Battistelli’s former employer does the same thing. As this tweet has just put it: “The French @INPIFrance and Spanish @OEPM_es delegations have presented a revised proposal for studies and activities on AI and #Patents that will be discussed during next session of SCP at @WIPO #scp30″
This cites Revised Proposal of Document SCP/28/7 by the Delegations of France and Spain. Benjamin Henrion took a look and quoted from it : France and Spain pushing for AI swpats [software patents] “patentability of inventions such as AI software as computer-implemented inventions, the use of AI as an aid to the creation of inventions or inventions generated independently by AI”…”
As we noted here quite recently, the EPO’s promotion of software patents is now a global threat. The buzzwords and the policies are being pushed elsewhere in Europe and even outside Europe.
We’ve very much aware that EPO examiners aren’t happy about it (some tell us so). SUEPO recently spoke about the collapse in patent quality. Examiners just cannot do their job anymore.
SUEPO has some other very legitimate concerns and yesterday it took note of a letter USF had published early in the week. We’re happy to report that Ben Wodecki became more like Dixon, his colleague, for a change. Instead of copying the EPO’s PR he now cites the USF’s letter and is in turn being cited by SUEPO (hours ago). To quote:
According to the USF, EPO staff “have been unfairly sanctioned and/or dismissed in the last five years”.
It said that EPO president António Campinos has failed to make improvements to move the office on from his controversial predecessor, Benoît Battistelli.
Union Syndicale Fédérale said that the social situation “has not substantially improved”.
It warned that the “anti-staff” policies from the previous administration are still in place and staff remain in a “painful situation”.
The resolution urges Campinos and the EPO to “take into account the demands of SUEPO”, as well as remedy the situation of dismissed staff members and “act swiftly … to reestablish social peace at the EPO”.
Today’s EPO is a threat to human rights, labour rights (took sacrifice to earn), patent quality, justice in Europe and the reputation of the EU. If this cannot be corrected somehow, then the EPO becomes an existential threat to the EU itself (EPO scandals already implicate EUIPO, an actual EU agency). UPC, the subject of our next post and an EU project, is just the edge of a large iceberg. █
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