03.27.20
With the Unified Patent Court (UPC) Out of the Way Focus Will Return to EPO Corruption
Nuked out of orbit, we don’t expect to hear much about the UPC in the coming years
Summary: Expect the European Patent Office (EPO) to receive more negative attention now that the ’cause’ of UPC is lost and there’s no point pretending things are rosy
I HAVE spent the past week studying very carefully all (or by far most of) the coverage about the decision that came out exactly a week ago, rendering the UPC more dead than ever (we’ve considered it dead since 2017 or 2016). “The Fall of the UPC – Part VIII” will hopefully be out by day’s end and we expect more than 10 parts in total. We group and present the coverage in a logically-coherent manner, e.g. clustering false claims that the UPC dying is actually “good news” for the UPC (yes, it has really gotten that absurd!).
We have meanwhile noticed that SUEPO does good work in Deutscher Bundestag. “On 25 February 2020,” it says, “the FDP parliamentary group submitted a “Kleine Anfrage” concerning the functioning of the EPO to the German Government. The English and French translations are available soon.”
“We don’t expect Team UPC to rear its ugly head for a while (except when spinning what happened a week ago), so hopefully we’ll be able to cover EPO corruption more frequently.”Well, since “English and French translations are available soon” and we prefer never to rely on automated translations (the EPO oughtn’t rely on these, either) we’ll wait until more material surfaces.
There’s also a reply which is dated 2 weeks ago. “The reply dated 11 March 2020,” SUEPO wrote this week, “was published by the German Government yesterday, read more here.” [PDF]
SUEPO-supportive voices called it “Questions and answers about the situation at the European Patent Office [...] The #EPO has faced widespread #criticism in the recent past. This ranged from the announced use of #financial resources, to the #quality standards of #patents , to the treatment of #employees, to a lack of independence of the boards of appeal.”
We don’t expect Team UPC to rear its ugly head for a while (except when spinning what happened a week ago), so hopefully we’ll be able to cover EPO corruption more frequently. Several scandals and big news are being “lost in Corona”.
“Several scandals and big news are being “lost in Corona”.”It’s a shame really; but journalists have priorities and some told us openly that due to Coronavirus they would not cover the latest EPO corruption scandal. I tried to mention it in IP Kat comments, but of course they deleted what I wrote. IP Kat in 2020 is ‘in bed’ with António Campinos and his patron.
Speaking of Campinos, the EPO has just shared these selective statistics: “In 2019, European companies accounted for the largest share of patent applications at the EPO in transport.”
Only transport?
An earlier tweet said: “The top 10 patent applicants at the EPO in 2019 include four companies from Europe, two from South Korea, two from the US and one from each of China and Japan…”
“The FCC is already receiving flak (from Team UPC) for calling out UPC abuses.”So only the minority are actually European! And barely a third of European Patents are actually European. So this system isn’t for Europe but for monopolists worldwide.
In the next post we’ll explain the role illegal software patents played in these statistics.
The FCC is already receiving flak (from Team UPC) for calling out UPC abuses. It named only one abuse, but it could name far more (it stopped at the first, nullifying the whole thing). Remember that it has several cases in the pipeline about EPO abuses. █
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