12.04.21

Gemini version available ♊︎

EPO-Bribed IAM ‘Media’ Has Praised Quality, Which Even EPO Staff (Examiners) Does Not Praise

Posted in Deception, Europe, Patents at 9:10 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Purple people
Office run by lying, law-breaking ‘suits’ instead of scientists

Summary: It’s easy to see something is terribly wrong when the people who do the actual work do not agree with the media’s praise of their work (a praise motivated by a nefarious, alternate agenda)

As we noted earlier this month and last month — preparation and publication, respectively — IAM had (once again, as usual) orchestrated the “quality” festival for Benoît Battistelli and António Campinos, seeking to mislead and manipulate EPO governance by a false sense of calm. Are they supposed to feel like their mis-governance accomplished success?

Over the years we published many articles about patent quality. We also saw EPO staff coming under exceptional threats/fire for merely pointed out the fact quality of European Patents (or validity of them) was rapidly decreasing. Instead of giving traffic/attention to the annual IAM lies (Watchtroll has just written about the EPO as well), let’s repost below a publication of relevance from earlier this year. We never reproduced it as HTML (and Gemini), but it’s never too late:

Time and Timeliness vs. Quality and Production Pressure?

Management is very proud of the quality of EPO products. Indeed, Goal 3 of the Strategic Plan 2020-2023 is to “Deliver high-quality products (and services efficiently)”.

But have you ever wondered how the quality of a search and a grant is actually defined? We have, and have previously written in detail on the topic.

The Office has also thought a lot about this issue, dedicating an entire intranet page (“Creating a common definition of quality”) to the search for a proper definition.

From that page, it can be derived that on the one hand:

• quality is still to be defined, i.e. one of the EPO’s projects is to ‘Develop a common definition of quality for EPO search and examination products that is agreed and shared with internal and external users’”,

but on the other hand

“quality is our top priority”.

Thus, as soon as quality is properly defined, it will be our top priority. Let’s assume that to be true.

Elsewhere on the intranet (“Early Certainty: EPO’s plan to improve timeliness and address business‘ needs”) we can read that “The EPO strives to provide high quality products which withstand potential post-grant proceedings. This establishes legal certainty”. So we can derive that quality is based, among other things, on whether the best prior art was found before examination.

Let’s now take a step back and look at what happens in reality.

The Office sets production targets that have considerably reduced the time available per application for each examiner. However, the less time you have, the less probable it will be that you can find the best prior art, thoroughly examine the application to check the requirements of the EPC, and draft your findings in a way that the applicant can understand them.

Therefore, this lessens the probability that your granted patent will withstand potential post-grant proceedings. This in turn can only worsen the quality, should it be defined as maximum legal validity. A detailed treatise on quality using this definition authored by the CSC inter alia can be found here1.

There are known counter-arguments to any pleas for increased (or even maintained) time for processing searches and examinations:

“If you can do this dossier in 3 days, you can do it in 3 days minus 1 hour”. This implies, if taken to its absurd, iterative conclusion, that every dossier could eventually be completed in zero minutes. Taken to an even more absurd extreme, we would be completing dossiers in negative time.

“The Applicant cannot wait for our products, we have to deliver them ASAP”. Should this really be at the expense of quality, as defined by maximum validity at grant? It is well known to applicants that if they want to proceed faster they can request accelerated search / examination. Such requests remain rare.

This situation by itself is bad enough, but it is complicated yet further by all sorts of “nice-to-haves” which have now been given to examiners as “must have” objectives. For example, for unclear reasons dossiers at the beginning of examination (Priority 3 in the dossier management system) also now have to be dealt with ASAP, so that they will be finished by the end of the year. However, such actions often do not lead to a grant, considering the normal patenting practice of applicants. Many further parameters of various sorts are also given to examiners as objectives, with questionable value as hard objectives. An earlier paper on “over-parameterisation” can be found here2.

In conclusion, we still cannot understand how a system with ever-higher production targets, and ever-more “unproductive” but mandatory goals, can be reconciled with the quality target the EPO has set for itself.

Your Staff Representation

_______
1 “Good enough? A discussion paper about Patent Quality at the EPO”, LSC Munich & Berlin paper (sc18003mp) of 19.04.2018
2 “All the President’s Peas”, CSC paper (sc18008cp) of 17.01.2018

Of course IAM et al won’t be writing about such simple facts; they’re paid to ignore reality or look the other way while the EPO spews out lots of Invalid Patents (IPs) instead of proper European Patents (EPs). We’ll publish more material related to this tomorrow (Sunday).

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 06/06/2023: OpenSUSE Plans for Leap

    Links for the day



  2. Gemini Links 06/06/2023: Bubble 4.0, Neutral News, and Older Bits

    Links for the day



  3. IBM's War on Open (Look at the Pattern of Layoffs at Red Hat)

    By abandoning OpenSource.com and OpenOffice.org/LibreOffice IBM sends out a clear signal that it doesn’t understand or simply does not care about the community of Free software users; its siege against the FSF and other institutions never ended and today we look at who’s being laid off or shown the door (the work environment is intentionally being made worse)



  4. Links 06/06/2023: IceWM 3.4.0 and Liveslak 1.7.0

    Links for the day



  5. Gemini Links 06/06/2023: Apple Might Kill VR, Tea Tea Deluxe 1.2.7 and Tea Land

    Links for the day



  6. IRC Proceedings: Monday, June 05, 2023

    IRC logs for Monday, June 05, 2023



  7. Links 05/06/2023: Debian 12 Almost Ready, Hong Kong 'Cannot' Remember Tiananmen Massacre

    Links for the day



  8. Gemini Links 05/06/2023: New Ship in Cosmic Voyage, Stack Overflow Moderator Strike

    Links for the day



  9. IRC Proceedings: Sunday, June 04, 2023

    IRC logs for Sunday, June 04, 2023



  10. Links 04/06/2023: Unifont 15.0.05 and PCLinuxOS Stuff

    Links for the day



  11. Gemini Links 04/06/2023: Wayland and the Old Computer Challenge

    Links for the day



  12. StatCounter: GNU/Linux (Including ChromeOS) Grows to 8% Market Share Worldwide

    This month’s numbers from StatCounter are good for GNU/Linux (including ChromeOS, which technically has both GNU and Linux); the firm assesses logs from 3 million sites and shows Windows down to 66% in desktops/laptops (a decade ago it was above 90%) with modest growth for GNU/Linux, which is at an all-time high, even if one does not count ChromeOS that isn’t freedom- or privacy-respecting



  13. Journalism Cannot and Quite Likely Won't Survive on the World Wide Web

    We’re reaching the point where the overwhelming majority of new pages on the Web (the World Wide Web) are basically junk, sometimes crafted not by humans; how to cope with this rapid deterioration is still an unknown — an enigma that demands hard answers or technical workarounds



  14. Do Not Assume Pensions Are Safe, Especially When Managed by Mr. EPOTIF Benoît Battistelli and António Campinos

    With the "hoax" that is the financial assessment by António Campinos (who is deliriously celebrating the inauguration of illegal and unconstitutional kangaroo courts) we urge EPO workers to check carefully the integrity of their pensions, seeing that pension promises have been broken for years already



  15. Links 04/06/2023: Why Flatpak and Wealth of Devices With GNU/Linux

    Links for the day



  16. Gemini Links 04/06/2023: Rosy Crow 1.1.3 and NearlyFreeSpeech.NET

    Links for the day



  17. IRC Proceedings: Saturday, June 03, 2023

    IRC logs for Saturday, June 03, 2023



  18. Links 04/06/2023: Azure Outage Again (So Many!) and Tiananmen Massacre Censored

    Links for the day



  19. Links 03/06/2023: Qubes OS 4.2.0 RC1 and elementaryOS Updates for May

    Links for the day



  20. Gemini Links 03/06/2023: Hidden Communities and Exam Prep is Not Education

    Links for the day



  21. Links 03/06/2023: IBM Betraying LibreOffice Some More (After Laying off LibreOffice Developers)

    Links for the day



  22. Gemini Links 03/06/2023: Bubble Woes and Zond Updates

    Links for the day



  23. Links 03/06/2023: Apache NetBeans 18 and ArcaOS 5.0.8

    Links for the day



  24. IRC Proceedings: Friday, June 02, 2023

    IRC logs for Friday, June 02, 2023



  25. The Developing World Abandons Microsoft Windows, GNU/Linux at All-Time Highs on Desktops/Laptops

    Microsoft, with 80 billion dollars in longterm debt and endless layoffs, is losing the monopolies; the media doesn’t mention this, but some publicly-accessible data helps demonstrate that



  26. Links 02/06/2023: Elive ‘Retrowave’ Stable and Microsoft's Half a Billion Dollar Fine for LinkeIn Surveillance in Europe

    Links for the day



  27. Linux Foundation 'Research' Has a New Report and Of Course It Uses Only Proprietary Software

    The Linux Foundation has a new report, promoted by Clickfraud Spamnil and others; of course they’re rejecting Free software, they’re just riding the “Linux” brand and speak of “Open Source” (which they reject themselves)



  28. Links 02/06/2023: Arti 1.1.5 and SQL:2023

    Links for the day



  29. Gemini Links 02/06/2023: Vimwiki Revisited, SGGS Revisited

    Links for the day



  30. Geminispace/GemText/Gemini Protocol Turn 4 on June 20th

    Gemini is turning 4 this month (on the 20th, according to the founder) and I thought I’d do a spontaneous video about how I use Gemini, why it's so good, and why it’s still growing (Stéphane Bortzmeyer fixed the broken cron job — or equivalent of it — a day or two after I had mentioned the issue)


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