04.22.19

USPTO and EPO Both Slammed for Abandoning Patent Quality and Violating the Law/Caselaw in Order to Grant Illegitimate Patents on Life/Nature and Mathematics

Posted in America, Deception, Europe, Patents at 1:18 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Man with a mission (against mission statements, Constitution, courts etc.)

Summary: Mr. Iancu, the ‘American Battistelli’ (appointed owing to nepotism), mirrors the ‘Battistelli operandi’, which boils down to treating judges like they’re stooges and justices like an ignorable nuisance — all this in the name of litigation profits, which necessitate constant wars over illegitimate patents (it is expensive to prove their illegitimacy)

THE deplorable “2019 Revised Patent Subject Matter Eligibility Guidance” from Iancu is thankfully backfiring. The vast majority of comments received so far strongly oppose it and the judges at the Federal Circuit fire back at Trump's 'circus clown' Iancu, seeing that this attorney tries to overrule all of their decisions with a stroke of a pen. He also weakens Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB) inter partes reviews (IPRs) — an issue not overlooked by anybody. Does he try to become an 'American Battistelli'? Certainly.

The Internet Association’s comments on the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office’s (USPTO) eligibility guidance, according to this new tweet, say: “The Guidance appears to stretch too far beyond the Alice safe harbors when it extends eligibility to the mere use of a judicial exception.”

We’ve decided to take a look at the full thing and it’s a really good — if not at times strongly-worded — response. It’s blasting Iancu for his bias and attack on PTAB’s independence. I have read the entire thing and rewrote it as HTML (manually):

IN THE UNITED STATES PATENT AND TRADEMARK OFFICE
________________________

2019 Revised Patent Subject Matter Eligibility Guidance
________________________

Docket No. PTO-P-2018-0053
________________________

COMMENTS OF THE INTERNET ASSOCIATION
________________________

William G. Jenks
Jenks IP Law PLLC
1629 K ST NW, Suite 300
Washington, DC 20006

March 8, 2019

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

[...]

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I. Commenter’s Interest And Initial Statement

The Internet Association is the unified voice of the Internet economy, representing the interests of America’s leading Internet companies and their global community of users.¹ The Association is dedicated to advancing public policy solutions to strengthen and protect Internet freedom, foster innovation and economic growth, and empower users. The members of the Internet Association have extensive experience with the application of the abstract idea exception in patent examination, litigation, and post-grant review proceedings.

The Internet Association applauds the USPTO for its continued serious examination of the contours of patent eligibility. The Federal Circuit continues to develop caselaw that informs the eligibility inquiry. But the Office has “the primary responsibility for sifting out unpatentable material” through examination.² It is fitting, therefore, that the Office periodically updates its guidance to better ensure that issued patents conform with the limits on eligibility set by the courts. The USPTO’s new Section 101 Guidance is a promising start that, with modification, will help the Office fulfill its role in the patent system.³

Structurally, the Guidance preserves the two-step test provided in Alice and Mayo. This structure is necessary if the Office is to maintain a strong correlation between the courts’ development of ineligibility law and the Office’s examination of patents under Section 101. But the Guidance also creates a structural bias against ineligibility rejections when the claims-at issue do not fit neatly into the categories provided. The Office should reconsider. There should not be any structural bias disfavoring (or favoring) a particular rejection. The merits of the individual case should singularly control any eligibility decision made by Office personnel.

Regarding substance, the Guidance incorporates lessons from some of the Federal Circuit’s leading cases but the Office should expand its approach to capture the full scope of eligibility law. In particular, the Guidance should (1) more fully explain how claims directed to data collection, manipulation, and display are to be treated and (2) better incorporate the caselaw’s reliance on improved technology in Step 2A. The Office should also reconsider its reliance on “hypothetical” examples. The Office would do better to build real caselaw into the Guidance.

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¹ The Internet Association’s members include Airbnb, Amazon, Ancestry, Coinbase, DoorDash, Dropbox, eBay, Etsy, Eventbrite, Expedia, Facebook, Google, Groupon, Handy, HomeAway, IAC, Intuit, Letgo, LinkedIn, Lyft, Match Group, Microsoft, Pandora, PayPal, Pinterest, Postmates, Quicken Loans, Rackspace, Rakuten, Reddit, Snap Inc., Spotify, Stripe, SurveyMonkey, Thumbtack, TransferWise, TripAdvisor, Turo, Twilio, Twitter, Uber, Upwork, Vivid Seats, Yelp, Zenefits, and Zillow Group.

² Graham v. John Deere Co. of Kansas City, 383 U.S. 1, 18 (1966).

³ 2019 Revised Patent Subject Matter Eligibility Guidance Dkt. No. PTO-P-2018-0053, 84 Fed. Reg. 50 (Jan. 7, 2019) (“Section 101 Guidance” or “Guidance”).

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II. The Section 101 Guidance Properly Relies On The Alice/Mayo Structure, But It Should Be Clarified To Better Show How The Substantive Caselaw Principles Are To Be Applied

The Guidance maintains the Office’s use of the Alice/Mayo two-step test.⁴ That is altogether fitting. The USPTO should resist any calls for changes to that basic structure. The Federal Circuit’s increased emphasis on what claims are “directed to” under Step 2A warrants the Office’s review and elucidation of that area. Commenters generally support the revised approach but suggest that the Office provide additional clarification in particular areas to reduce Examiner misunderstandings when applying the Guidance.

A. The Guidance should clarify and further elucidate the Office’s approach to claims reciting data collection, manipulation, and display under Step 2A

The Guidance limits the categories of “key concepts” that are “abstract ideas” to: (a) mathematical concepts, (b) certain methods of organizing human activity, which includes several subcategories, and (c) mental processes.⁵

The essential clarification needed is that data collection, manipulation, and display fall either within the mathematical concepts category or form a fourth abstract-ideas category. The “mathematical concepts” category, if interpreted in the strictest sense, may not capture the breadth of caselaw, which extends the abstract idea exception to “‘collecting information, analyzing it, and displaying certain results of the collection and analysis.’”⁶ These data claims appear in a large number of eligibility cases, and the Guidance should explicitly recognize that claims reciting data (or information) collection, manipulation, and display are also within the “groupings of subject matter” that have been “identified by the courts as abstract ideas.”⁷

In SAP America, for example, claims focused on “selecting certain information, analyzing it using mathematical techniques, and reporting or displaying the results of the analysis” were “directed to abstract ideas.”⁸ The Court explained that each of these aspects, “[i]nformation as such,” “collecting information,” “analyzing information,” and “presenting the results” without more, was directed to an abstract idea.⁹ McRO was distinguished because the “claimed improvement [in the McRO claims] was to how the physical display operated (to

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⁴ Section 101 Guidance at 50, col.3.
⁵ Section 101 Guidance at 52, cols. 1-3.
⁶ SAP America, Inc. v. InvestPic, LLC, 898 F.3d 1161, 1167 (Fed. Cir. 2018). (quoting Elec. Power Grp. v. Alstom S.A., 830 F.3d 1350, 1353 (Fed. Cir. 2016)).
⁷ Section 101 Guidance at 52, col. 1.
⁸ SAP America, 898 F.3d at 1167.
⁹ Id.

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produce better quality images)” and not “to a mathematical technique with no improved display mechanism.”¹⁰

SAP America is not an isolated case. The principles therein have been invoked and followed in multiple, precedential, Federal Circuit decisions holding other data-manipulation claims to be directed to abstract ideas.¹¹ These decisions include precedential cases not cited in the Guidance;¹² and at least one precedential case issued after the Guidance.¹³ These principles should, therefore, be more fully explained in the Guidance—including identifying the appropriate category for such claims–to ensure that they are accounted for during examination.

B. The Section 101 Guidance should be modified to better reflect the caselaw’s emphasis on improved technology

The Supreme Court identified two potential categories of patent-eligible subject matter in its Alice decision: Claims that (1) “purport to improve the functioning of the computer itself” or (2) “effect an improvement in any other technology or technical field” could be more than a simple recitation of the abstract idea applied on a computer.¹⁴

The Guidance properly relies on the Supreme Court’s view to link eligible subject matter to improvement in the functioning of a computer or other technical field.¹⁵ But the Guidance appears to stretch too far beyond the Alice safe harbors when it extends eligibility to the mere use

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¹⁰ Id.
¹¹ See, e.g., Interval Licensing LLC v. AOL, Inc., 896 F.3d 1335, 1346 (Fed. Cir. 2018) (“In sum, the recited claims are directed to an abstract idea because they consist of generic and conventional information acquisition and organization steps that are connected to, but do not convert, the abstract idea—displaying a second set of data without interfering with a first set of data—into a particular conception of how to carry out that concept.”).
¹² See, e.g., Intellectual Ventures I LLC v. Capital One Fin. Corp., 850 F.3d 1332, 1340 (Fed. Cir. 2017) (“We find that, under step one, the claims [at issue] are abstract. We conclude that the patent claims are, at their core, directed to the abstract idea of collecting, displaying, and manipulating data.”); FairWarning IP, LLC v. Iatric Sys., Inc., 839 F.3d 1089, 1093 (Fed. Cir. 2016) (Explaining that “the ‘realm of abstract ideas’ includes ‘collecting information, including when limited to particular content,’ ‘analyzing information,’ and ‘presenting the results … of collecting and analyzing information.’”); see also Two-Way Media Ltd. v. Comcast Cable Commc’ns, LLC, 874 F.3d 1329, 1338 (Fed. Cir. 2017), cert. denied, 139 S. Ct. 378, 202 L. Ed. 2d 288 (2018); Elec. Power Grp. v. Alstom S.A., 830 F.3d 1350, 1353 (Fed. Cir. 2016).
¹³ Univ. of Fl. Research Foundation, Inc. v. General Electric Co., No. 2018-1284, slip op. at 10 (Fed. Cir. Feb. 26, 2019) (“[C]laim 1 is directed to the abstract idea of ‘collecting, analyzing, manipulating, and displaying data.’”).
¹⁴ Alice Corp. Pty. v. CLS Bank Int’l, 573 U.S. 208, 225 (2014).
¹⁵ Section 101 Guidance at 55, col. 1.

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of a judicial exception “in conjunction with a machine or manufacture” or in “a transformation or reduction of a particular article.”¹⁶

The Guidance should more closely tie “practical application”—the lynchpin of eligibility analysis in the Guidance—to technological improvement, which is present in all or nearly all the Federal Circuit’s Step-2A cases. The Guidance cites Eibel Process and Diehr to support its additional eligible categories. Eibel Process is linked to use in conjunction with a machine; Diehr to use in a transformation of an article.¹⁷ In both cases, the eligible invention claimed improved the technology at issue. In Eibel, the claimed Fourdrinier machine made paper at a pace much faster than prior machines, and the claims, the Court noted, were “for an improvement on a machine.”¹⁸ Similarly, the Supreme Court has made clear that “the claims in Diehr were patent eligible because they improved an existing technological process.”¹⁹ Thus, mere incorporation of a machine or transformation in the claim does not justify a rule requiring the claims be eligible under the cases cited.

C. The Section 101 Guidance should recognize the legal distinction between claims reciting a result or function without specifying the mechanism that achieves that result or function and claims that recite a technological advance

The Supreme Court has long distinguished claims that merely recite a result achieved from those that specify the method and mechanism for achieving that result. For example, Samuel Morse famously invented and patented the telegraph. But one of his claims failed because it merely recited “electro-magnetism, however developed, for making or printing intelligible characters, letters, or signs, at any distances, being a new application of that power.”20 The claim was “void” because it covered “an effect produced by the use of electromagnetism, distinct from the process or machinery necessary to produce it.”²¹ The Supreme Court has relied on this key principle while determining subject matter eligibility for centuries.²²

The Federal Circuit has repeatedly relied on the same distinction in its post-Alice eligibility analysis. Claims that merely recite a desired result are more likely directed to an abstract idea. For example, in Internet Patents, which is not cited or discussed in the Guidance, the Federal Circuit held ineligible a claim that merely recited a desired “effect or result

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¹⁶ Id. (punctuation removed).
¹⁷ Id.
¹⁸ Eibel Process Co. v. Minnesota & Ontario Paper Co., 261 U.S. 45, 55, 70 (1923). 19 Alice Corp., 573 U.S. at 223.
²⁰ O’Reilly v. Morse, 56 U.S. 62, 86 (1853).
²¹ Id. at 120; see also The Telephone Cases, 126 U.S. 1, 534 (1888) (quoting Morse). 22 See, e.g., Bilski v. Kappos, 561 U.S. 593, 649 (2010); Mayo, 132 S. Ct. at 1301; Parker v. Flook, 437 U.S. 584, 592 (1978); Gottschalk v. Benson, 409 U.S. 63, 68-69 (1972); The Telephone Cases, 126 U.S. at 534.

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dissociated from any method by which [the result] is accomplished.”23 The “character of the claimed invention [was] an abstract idea” because the claim-at-issue contained “no restriction on how the result is accomplished.”²⁴ Thus, the claim was “not directed to patent-eligible subject matter.”²⁵

Multiple precedential Federal Circuit cases rely on this principle to show that claims reciting a mere result or function are more likely directed to abstract ideas.²⁶ On the other hand, claims that recite both a result or function and “an improvement of an existing technology” are typically “directed to” the technological improvement.²⁷

III.The Guidance Should Incorporate And Explain Caselaw

The Section 101 Guidance sets forth the basic steps of examination under caselaw principles. But it fails to incorporate this caselaw directly. The cases are relegated to footnotes with brief parentheticals. This does little to help Examiners understand the distinctions between what is and is not an eligible “practical application.” It is primarily claims that recite the use of abstract ideas to improve the use of machines or to improve industrial processes that are patent eligible in the cases cited.

Given the complexity of the subject matter, the Office can increase the utility of the Guidance by testing the claims and facts of actual cases against each step set forth in the

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²³ Internet Patents Corp. v. Active Network, Inc., 790 F.3d 1343, 1348 (Fed. Cir. 2015).
²⁴ Internet Patents, 790 F.3d at 1348.
²⁵ Id.
²⁶ Smart Sys. Innovations, LLC v. Chicago Transit Auth., 873 F.3d 1364, 1371 (Fed. Cir. 2017) (Under Alice step one, courts “‘look to whether the claims … focus on a specific means or method that improves the relevant technology or are instead directed to a result or effect that itself is the abstract idea.’”) (quoting McRO at 1313); Apple, Inc. v. Ameranth, Inc., 842 F.3d 1229, 1244 (Fed. Cir. 2016) (“Generally, a claim that merely describes an effect or result dissociated from any method by which it is accomplished is not directed to patent-eligible subject matter.”) (internal marks and brackets omitted); Affinity Labs of Texas, LLC v. DIRECTV, LLC, 838 F.3d 1253, 1265 (Fed. Cir. 2016) (Under “the principles emerging from the developing body of law on abstract ideas under section 101, this court has noted that claims that are so result-focused, so functional, as to effectively cover any solution to an identified problem are frequently held ineligible under section 101.”) (internal marks omitted); Intellectual Ventures I LLC v. Symantec Corp., 838 F.3d 1307, 1316 (Fed. Cir. 2016).
²⁷ McRO, Inc. v. Bandai Namco Games Am. Inc., 837 F.3d 1299, 1316 (Fed. Cir. 2016) (“[C]laim 1 is directed to a patentable, technological improvement over the existing, manual 3–D animation techniques. The claim uses the limited rules in a process specifically designed to achieve an improved technological result in conventional industry practice. Claim 1 of the ’576 patent, therefore, is not directed to an abstract idea.”) (citations omitted); see also Enfish, LLC v. Microsoft Corp., 822 F.3d 1327, 1336 (Fed. Cir. 2016) (claims “directed to a specific improvement to the way computers operate” eligible).

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Guidance. It would also be helpful to explain how the arguments were presented by the parties and either accepted or rejected by the Court. The resulting case studies can then be an integral part of the Guidance and used in place of the “hypothetical” examples the USPTO has provided on its website.²⁸

IV.Examiners Should Retain The Authority To Reject Claims As Ineligible Under Section 101 Without Seeking Director Approval

The Internet Association believes that one structural change—unrelated to the test for eligibility itself—is needed in the new Section 101 Guidance.

The Section 101 Guidance places too high a burden on Examiners that believe a claim is ineligible even if it does not fit neatly into the subject matter categories provided. Presented with such claims, the Examiner must seek out and receive the approval of their Technology Center Director before issuing a rejection.²⁹ This is in addition to the ordinary, proper requirement that the Examiner provide justification supporting the invocation of the abstract idea exception.

Directors are generally multiple levels above an Examiner in the chain of command—and they face numerous demands on their time—making it difficult and time consuming for the Examiner to seek and receive their approval. Fulfilling such a requirement is much harder than, for example, seeking approval from a Supervisory Patent Examiner. There is also no indication that the Examiner will receive the requisite time needed to seek and obtain this approval. Without extra time and under the USPTO’s current press of business, this would add pressure on the examining corps to issue claims that they deem ineligible.³⁰ At a minimum, the Agency should allocate so-called “other time” to ameliorate this bias.

Requiring Director approval thus creates an artificial bias in the examination process that favors not testing the eligibility of patent claims. To the extent a bias should be built into the system, it should favor testing the contours of eligibility law in the USPTO—where applicants have appeal rights both within the Office and to the courts—over issuing categories of potentially ineligible claims unchallenged. Such claims may, if issued, eventually be found ineligible by the courts but only after causing enormous damage through years-long litigation. As between the patent owner and the public, the patent owner is best situated and incentivized to

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28 See Subject Matter Eligibility Examples: Abstract Ideas, available at

https://www.uspto.gov/sites/default/files/documents/101_examples_37to42_20190107.pdf.

²⁹ Section 101 Guidance at 57, col. 1.
³⁰ See, ^e.g., Michael D. Frakes & Melissa Wasserman, Is the Time Allocated to Review Patent Applications Inducing Examiners to Grant Invalid Patents? Evidence from Micro-Level Application Data, Review of Economics and Statistics (forthcoming) 4, available at https://scholarship.law.duke.edu/faculty_scholarship/3646 (“Importantly, our findings demonstrate … that examiners appear to be operating at the point where time constraints indeed bind.”).

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seek a definitive eligibility ruling in cases deemed ineligible through the ordinary examination process.

To be clear, the Internet Association is not suggesting a bias be added in either direction. But any structural bias—including the present bias against Examiner Section 101 rejections—should be removed. Finally, in a footnote, the Guidance suggests a similar burden heightening will be applied to the PTAB judges.31 Commenters likewise oppose the bias created by the process sketched out therein.

V. Conclusion

The Internet Association again applauds the USPTO for its continued serious examination of the contours of patent eligibility law. The Internet Association believes that the USPTO’s approach of considering all views will lead to clearer Guidance and thanks the USPTO for the opportunity to provide its views.

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³¹ Section 101 Guidance at 57 n.42.

It’s just pretty amazing how similar the situation is to the European Patent Office (EPO), where patents on life and nature are being granted in defiance of a directive (similar to Mayo in caselaw form) and António Campinos disguises European software patents using ludicrous buzzwords such as “AI” and “MedTech”. Just spectacular or astounding that he keeps getting away with it. Why is nobody holding him accountable? He does the equivalent of stomping on Alice, i.e. the highest court and 35 U.S.C. § 101.

Thankfully, EPO patent examiners know they’re being manipulated. Just cited by some Team UPC folks and also by SUEPO (even over the long weekend) was this thing we wrote about on Sunday — something on which several comments have been left including the following comment by “Nothing has changed at EPO since Battistelli’s departure” (the poster’s pseudonym on its own says a lot):

In the link below you will find a recent video (in French) about France Telecom scandalous HR practices and the soon to come prominent court case.

Many of the obnoxious HR techniques which were applied at FT – with the despicable effects on staff health reported upon broadly – were also applied at the EPO during Battistelli’s era.

With no surprise, the results of such policies at EPO were similar to those at France Telecom, see : https://www.politico.eu/article/labor-relations-turn-toxic-in-the-european-patent-office/

Obviously the issue of quality at EPO depends first and foremost on the kind of HR policies applied to staff, which presently continue to generate a very negative social atmosphere.

All HR top managers who were behind such despicable HR policies have been maintained in their positions since the arrival of Mr Campinos 10 months ago.

As long as management by pressure and fear goes on and put staff under undue pressure for more production vs. quality, nothing will change. The sweet story-telling of Mr Campinos is fooling no one since he takes no concrete actions to reverse the unhealthy work pressure.

Inevitably more social damages hence quality issues are thus in sight.

The prior comment speaks in length about erosion of patent quality — a subject long explored by SUEPO, which had warned about it for years and weeks ago said that tens of thousands of bunk European Patents are being granted each year. █

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04.18.19

Concluding the Linux Foundation (LF) “Putting the CON in Conference!” (Part 3)

Posted in Deception, GNU/Linux, Microsoft at 6:04 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Back to “Con in Conference”… (part 1 here and part 2 here)

Summary: Conferences constructed or put together based on payments rather than merit pose a risk to the freedom of free software; we conclude our series about events set up by the largest of culprits, which profits from this erosion of freedom

WHEN we started writing about the Linux Foundation (LF) earlier this year it wasn’t exactly unprecedented because we had written many articles about LF about a decade back. But this latest series deals with one particular aspect or a set of new aspects.

“Is the LF just a PR agency?”The LF staff pays itself humongous amounts of money while profiting from ‘services’ such as selling press coverage and tweets. Ideally, tweets would bear a disclosure, naming the sponsor and saying they’re sponsored. The LF, however, does not disclose that as far as we know. Which takes us into a grey/dark area…

We still try to closely and patiently study the matter and as we go along we come across even worse things. Identifying the pertinent tweets, for instance, would require going to dates of LF events and trying to see what was tweeted and when. An enormous task and guesswork. The brochure, however (shown in full in Techrights), makes it abundantly clear that LF gets paid by sponsors in exchange for tweets. Some are posted by so-called ‘influencers’ rather than official LF accounts. Is the LF just a PR agency? We’ve never heard of PR non-profits.

A reader of ours recently remarked on Jono Bacon, one of of those ‘influencers’ whom we mentioned quite recently because he works for the LF and posts pro-Microsoft stuff. To quote the reader:

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Here’s what I have

ScaLE -

[Name omitted] and his wife seem nice enough. They are trying to keep afoot, by pushing hard on expo booth and sponsors.

[Name omitted] also is “buddies” with Jono – according to what I can see.

Every ScaLE, Jono and his band play, etc.

The ScaLE 15x I attended, included the following:

Adobe speaking about their software

A Windows user who speaks at Linux Foundation summits about “activism as open source”. She has no idea… and LF did sponsor that event (no doubt this is how this speaker got her slot)

der Hans – again … and again… and again… – He’s friends with ScaLE, SEAgl and had gotten a slot at LibrePlanet when [name omitted] was doing the evaluations.

There is nothing explicitly declared with ScaLE that states you get a presentation. However, after speaking with [name omitted] from LFNW, there has been, over the years an expectation by sponsors to have a presentation slot. JS.

There is explicit expectation by LF sponsors.

It’s a mess.

Final note today:

I don’t think people realize the money and “sponsor benefits” of these LF events, especially. The “training” is mostly bias, in my humble opinion.

See the sponsor prospectus for more insight. I think you will see, just from that, what is going on and what I believe needs to be reported.

These 3 musketeers — volunteering or running conferences and having an agenda — hard to really prove, but… needless to say they all have a hand in the pot and all 3 had spoken at Linux Foundation events.

I want to see if I can find [name omitted]‘s information about how he was blocked from holding a conference – and it was ugly. … that’s ancient history though.

Well, I can tell you something… The Contributor (or censorship) covenant was adopted by Intel recently because of [name omitted] pushing it and the excuse is the (I can get his name) adoption at Linux Foundation — right. So, just after that, the Open Source Community Manager Jeffro – Jeff Osier-Mixon, another FSF alumnus, interviewed Jono Bacon — right.

So Jono has been a longtime wingman for LF, as far as I can see. He posts swag from Microsoft and promotes for LF — even posts tweets sponsors pay for (we have proof of this). If you read on Advogato, Jono made some rude comments about RMS about… 2001-2002… (we have that too).

The blog post from 2001 where he made comments about RMS — like — “he needs a wakeup call,” is here (archived).

Anyway – after interviewing Jono (Jeff claims they go way back) and after adopting the contributor covenant at Intel — a few months later — Jeff… got a program manager job at Linux Foundation.

The timing… was interesting.

You reported on that Community Bridge [a Microsoft-led “Community Bridge”] about a week before Jono “advertised” it on his site. Notice he responded to Bradley M. Kuhn (this comment).

Jono, I was inspired that you wrote in your book, the Art of Community, that: “You should always ensure that the tools that you choose to use for your community are easy to access…and freely available.” I was therefore slightly surprised to see you endorse the Community Bridge platform so unequivocally — given that the entire platform appears to be proprietary software, secretly developed, not freely available, and not easy to access. Also, LF didn’t need to reinvent the wheel anyway, as there are many Open Source projects around working on platforms for this purpose that Linux Foundation could have collaborated with — and not just those at Software Freedom Conservancy [0] — but also at organizations like Commit Change, Open Collective, Tech Cultivation and Liberapay.
[0] Full disclosure (as some readers of Jono’s blog might not know): I am employed by Software Freedom Conservancy. We published a blog post about this topic here: https://sfconservancy.org/blog/2019/mar/13/lf-community-bridge/ I have no affiliation to Open Collective, Tech Cultivation, and Liberapay. I have no affiliation Commit Change either, but they’re a major contributor to the Conservancy member project, Houdini.

Later, Jono was also promoting the GitHub/Microsoft acquisition as a good thing. He’s a total LF/Microsoft “pimp”.

How I started to notice something odd about Jono was when there was some Ubuntu controversy. I recalled his role and his “efforts”. In addition, I recalled his Advogato post. How is this person a “leader”? It’s crazy.

More detailed tldr SFC comments about Community Bridge.

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While we prefer to keep it impersonal (and almost all names were removed), some people’s identity can be inferred/guessed by those mentioned. We just don’t want the public as a whole to see the names and harass people who don’t deserve abuse.

One of our members, who has been watching these things for a number of decades, remarked: “Bacon was inside Canonical for a long time, too. I think his presence hurt the company and, especially, the Ubuntu project. At the time I objected to his top-down style as spinmeister which he used instead of interacting with the community with give-and-take. Then his Microsoft tendencies started to become apparent and Shuttleworth failed to fire him. Now Ubuntu is quite out of favor.”

Meanwhile, Canonical closed bug #1 and Mark Shuttleworth started working with Microsoft. Yesterday they released a new version of Ubuntu, but there was hardly any marketing associated with that.

Our member has been studying Jono’s tweets in an effort to identify sponsored ones. He “didn’t spot anything but other eyes might,” he said. “I guess the place to look would be about this part of his timeline, but I’m not finding anything incriminating.

“It may have taken time for any company to get going on taking up the offer of paid tweets. However, I think there are clues he went fully over earlier than that. There are some dodgy looking tweets lately.”

Former Ubuntu community chief, as it turns out, does not even use GNU/Linux. He uses a Mac, just like his friend Jim Zemlin. It’s right there in his tweets, alongside other problematic ones [1, 2, 3, 4, 5]. If these are the people who steer the direction of the LF, then we’re in trouble. GNU/Linux is in trouble.

“He spends an awful lot of time defending and admiring Microsoft in many of his tweets,” our member concluded. “Shuttleworth picked a dud and that choice hurt Ubuntu badly as a result. PS: He’s becoming a politician.”

There are many signs, like the above, that software freedom isn’t a priority at all. We need to address that. █

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04.16.19

Corporate Media Will Never Cover the EPO’s Violations of the Law With Respect to Patent Scope

Posted in Deception, Europe, Patents at 4:56 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

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:

1. Marks & Clerk is Still Pushing Patent Maximalism Agenda in Europe and Britain, Including UPC/UPCA/Unitary Patent (UP)
2. Marks & Clerk Blames Battistelli’s Victims, the Boards of Appeal, Whose Job Guarded Patent Quality
3. Software Patents Are a Dying Breed, So Marks & Clerk and Other Legal Monoliths Promote the EPO’s Buzzwords (Loopholes)
4. 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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04.12.19

Global Finance Magazine Spreads Lies About the Unitary Patent and German Constitutional Court

Posted in Deception, Europe, Patents at 8:58 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

The front page of Global Finance Magazine at this moment

Summary: Alluding to the concept of a “unified European patent,” some site connected to Class Editori S.p.A. and based in Manhattan/New York City tells obvious lies about the Unified Patent Court (UPC), possibly in an effort to sway outcomes and twist people’s expectations

THE UPC is pretty much dead. UPC-related Twitter accounts are largely inactive, blogs associated with the advocates (Team UPC) have barely said a thing for a month, and the European Patent Office (EPO) never mentions it anymore. It is very rarely mentioned in news sites (in any form).

“Will these people stop spreading these patently false claims?”Yesterday we saw Global Finance Magazine (of Class Editori, an Italian publishing giant) pretending that Brexit can be overcome by shifting the court to Milan (Italy) and the German Constitutional Court (FCC) isn’t an obstacle but just some temporary ‘nuisance’ — both typical lies of Team UPC. We don’t know the author of this terrible new article, but we’ve never heard of this publication called “Global Finance” before (it probably didn’t cover UPC); we started wondering who owns it. Misinformation of this kind typically comes from “news” sites of Team UPC, such as The Law Society Gazette [1, 2, 3].

The author starts by spreading an appalling lie: “Long in the works, a unified European patent is now ready to launch, most likely in mid-2019.”

Really? Based on what? Notice the future tense being used throughout (as if it’s all a certainty, no “would… if”). It doesn’t take a genius to say that the UPC is dead. Even some of its biggest cheerleaders admit so. More from that same article:

Courts with oversight over the European unified patent system will be based in London, Paris and Munich; although the German Constitutional Court must evaluate its constitutionality and the London Court could move to Milan for pharmaceutical patents.

The proposed Unified Patent Court will have power to take action on patent infringement, counterfeiting, ascertainment of invalidity and revocation, as well as related provisional and precautionary measures and application counterclaims. Damage claims related to supplementary protection certificates issued on the basis of a European patent will also be under the court’s purview.

Will? It’s not happening. Will these people stop spreading these patently false claims? Will they also mention just how terrible the UPC is, for a whole plethora of reasons? According to Wikipedia, this magazine has a circulation of about 50,000 people/subscribers. Who’s seeding these pieces? █

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04.11.19

EPO Still Wasting Budget, Paying Media and Academics for Spin

Posted in Deception, Europe, Patents at 7:33 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Summary: EPO money continues to flow like water into hands that are complicit in legitimising the EPO’s management and policies; this highlights the grave dangers of lack of oversight at the EPO, not to mention lawlessness or lack of enforcement

ONE aspect of EPO misconduct has been corruption and bribery of media — a topic we’ve covered in literally dozens of posts over the years. It leads to erosion of public trust in journalism. To make matters worse, the EPO did the same thing to academia. For a number of years it had been paying scholars to produce EPO propaganda. As a former scholar myself, I find that rather disturbing. It represents one of the things I hated most, having seen industry-funded colleagues and ‘research’. This is not acceptable as it causes the public to be sceptical of universities, even when they speak of serious issues such as climate change. The EPO has been lying to its staff for a very long time, never mind the lies to journalists (some of whom repeated EPO lies without being paid for it). We gave a lot of examples.

“This is not acceptable as it causes the public to be sceptical of universities, even when they speak of serious issues such as climate change.”Earlier this week when we wrote about the new survey — a load of spin that we later dubbed Management's Voice, Management's Future — readers wrote to us with further input. They found the survey insulting. It insulted their intelligence. Yesterday JUVE’s most familiar face tweeted: “The 2019 EPO staff survey results yield a mixed bag. Staff workload shows a marked improvement compared to conditions under the previous president. But not all feedback about the new mangement is positive.”

JUVE’s article was composed by Christina Schulze, generally a good journalist with solid knowledge and understanding in this area (she has a good track record when it comes to covering EPO scandals). The title says “Aiming for peace at the EPO,” but who wouldn’t be aiming for it? Even dictators say they want peace. They want calm. They want people to stop resisting injustice, dictatorship. But does the EPO aim for justice? No.

“The EPO is amplifying its employee voice,” say the article’s first words, but in reality that’s just EPO management claiming to be doing that while distorting that voice. Ask the staff (without that staff risking reprisal). The opening paragraph states:

The EPO is amplifying its employee voice through a new staff survey. It was conducted this year by risk management and advisory company Willis Towers Watson.

The study aims to determine if the revamped management strategy is having a positive impact on staff participation in the EPO. With a response rate of 85%, exactly 5,675 EPO employees participated.

We expected such press coverage, not necessarily from the above site with its often pro-UPC and sometimes pro-EPO spin — all in the name of ‘balance’ of course! (i.e. believing Team Battistelli and greedy Team UPC)

As we shall see (or already show at this moment), being pro-EPO (management) is a “smart” business decision because there’s money up for grabs. Battistelli seeded millions of EPO euros for such a purpose. Sites like IAM grabbed that money (e.g. pro-UPC event in the US).

Looking around for some UPC coverage, we’ve just found US media with connections to the EPO boosting the UPC. Vincent Look, “an intellectual property and registered patent attorney” by his own description, published under the loaded headline “What to Know in the Lead-Up to Brexit and the Unitary Patent System” even though the UPC is dead. This comes from Watchtroll, so it’s consistent with what they did before. The EPO links to them and gives them interviews, never mind the site’s aggressive tendencies. Watch what politicians they’re associated with (notice IAM at the background):

He also spoke at IAM events and here’s Watchtroll:

Shown above is Coons. Watchtroll has has just published an article titled “Tillis, Coons Ask Iancu to Take Action on Serial IPR Challenges” (like appeals at the EPO).

These spinners try to make people who call out fake patents seem like the moral equivalent of trolls. In their own words: “In their latest letter weighing in on intellectual property issues, Senators Thom Tillis and Chris Coons have expressed their concerns about the effects of “serial” inter partes review (IPR) petitions on the U.S. patent system.”

Notice the wording; it’s like “serial infringer” or “efficient infringer” — terms they habitually use to demonise practicing companies as opposed to trolls and law firms (i.e. themselves). Coons is just trying to make a name (and career) for himself out of this anti-PTAB trash [1, 2, 3]. He has done that for years. He failed. For years! Watchtroll is again conflating patents with science or invention (“Senate IP Subcommittee Witnesses Offer Solutions for Finding ‘Lost Einsteins,’ But Miss Opportunity to Discuss Broader Patent Problems” published yesterday). Such is the effect of making a fake ‘industry’ of lawyers and lawsuits; they obstruct science for legal billing.

Whose side is the EPO on? Today’s EPO is working for patent bullies and trolls.
An article by José Santacroce (Moeller IP Advisors) reminded us of it yesterday. To quote:

The European Patent Office (EPO), the European Committee of Standardization (CEN) and the European Committee for Electrotechnical Standardization (CENELEC) have signed recently a memorandum of understanding (MoU) to enhance the support they provide to industry and stakeholders in Europe and beyond in the field of standard-essential patents.

This is the first MoU between the organizations who will now work together to extend knowledge about the relationship between standardization and patents.

The purpose of this collaboration is to support inventors, innovators, researchers and industry on standard-essential patents (SEPs) in different areas of technology by promoting the dissemination of technical standards including relevant patented technologies. The agreement complements the established co-operation in this field between the EPO, the European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI) and the European Commission.

The above from Mondaq is self-promotional (as usual from that site), but it shows that law firms like what the EPO is doing. It’s good for them. It’s good for their biggest clients (large multinational corporations). And yet the EPO still pretends to care about “SMEs” while constantly undermining them, discriminating against them and so on. Yesterday it wrote: “Claire Fentsch from @IPRHelpdesk will set out the basic IP toolkit that SMEs need at this event in Bucharest” (an EPO promotional event).

There’s a similar issue in the US, but we do not cover US cases and affairs anymore (not at the same level of granularity). See our daily links under “Intellectual Monopolies” for more details. At the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) PTAB continues to leverage prior art and obviousness (Sections 102 and 103, not just Section 101) to eliminate bad patents. Even the anti-PTAB Anticipat says so and presents numbers/graphs. So patents continue to be thrown out aplenty. If they’re not valid, they should bin them. We also took stock of some upcoming cases and outcomes that are encouraging. Software patents are definitely not coming back to the US (not soon anyway).

Meanwhile, proponents of software patents in Europe have mentioned the UPC in this piece that was mentioned by SUEPO before. Tobias Kaufmann (Bardehle Pagenberg) speaks of the employer’s “Contribution To The Public Consultation” of the EPO, which hardly changed at all.

Based on yesterday’s tweets and “news” from the EPO, António Campinos belatedly continues the same program Battistelli created as a publicity stunt while bribing academics for bias and lies. In this tweet about call for proposals the EPO links to this old page (warning: epo.org link) and says: “We’ve just launched a new edition of our Academic Research Programme. What it is, how to win a grant and all other details are just a click away…”

The press release (warning: epo.org link) says:

Under the programme, grants of up to EUR 100 000 are awarded in respect of selected proposals on patent-related matters.

[...]

The 2019 call for projects addresses the following thematic areas spanning various disciplines including economics, IP management, and data sciences:

Measuring the impact of patents on innovation
The role of patents in technology transfer, commercialisation, and/or investment decisions
Patent services and intermediaries
Patents and disruptive technologies (AI, Blockchain, 3D, etc.)
Impact of public policy and the regulatory landscape on the use of patents by SMEs and PROs across Europe
Patents and climate change mitigation technologies
Advanced use of PATSTAT, patent searching, and analytics (e.g. classification, potential of IP linked open data)

So the EPO is like oil companies funding ‘research’ on pollution caused by oil. Wonderful. Nothing has changed. Campinos pays PR firms, he produces expensive fake narrative of staff welfare and now he pays for sellout ‘scholars’ (like the Koch brothers do for patent 'research' in the US).

Speaking of sellouts, only months after EPO Attaché Albert Keyack entered the private sector (like Jesper Kongstad) we now see Alberto Casado Cerviño doing the same.

“Alberto Casado Cerviño, the European Patent Office’s former vice president, has joined Spanish IP boutique Baylos,” World Intellectual Property Review wrote yesterday. Battistelli’s bulldog has meanwhile created his own business in Croatia.

The EPO has a 'revolving doors' problem, just like the USPTO. From corridors of EPO corruption these people move on to private firms or create their own, ‘monetising’ their connections. █

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04.10.19

Linux Magazine is Run by Advertisers, Not GNU/Linux (and It’s Hardly the Exception)

Posted in Deception, GNU/Linux at 7:27 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Big corporations are buying and silencing (muzzling) voices in the GNU/Linux community

Summary: Advertising is big money — so big in fact that publications no longer care what’s true but instead focus on what text brings them more income (from advertisers, of course)

A LONG time ago when I was a Ph.D. student an editor approached me to write articles for his site, Datamation. At first I was paid 50 or 100 dollars per article; later on it was 200. Not a bad way to help pay tuition fees as a relatively poor student. But later on Datamation removed things that I wrote about Microsoft. It wasn’t hard to see that Microsoft had become an advertiser (competitive ads, targeting articles about GNU/Linux in order to promote Windows). After a while I stopped writing there and put all my articles here in Techrights (including all those I had published in Datamation, as I was permitted to do after a number of months). That was more than a decade ago. I stopped writing there in 2007 or 2008. Since then Techrights has published well over 20,000 articles, mostly articles about patents. My lesson from that experience at Datamation, however, was valuable; I became well aware of the role of advertisers, e.g. in censorship or at least self-censorship, imposed in a top-down fashion (like publisher/editor removing paragraphs/articles). Looking at Datamation earlier this month, it seemed like many of the articles there are now composed by a longtime (over a decade) Microsoft booster, who used to promote Microsoft products and bash GNU/Linux, mostly at IDG (now Chinese-owned and barely active anymore).

“The only time they wrote about me it was an attack on me and on Techrights.”Techrights never had any sponsors. It doesn’t want any. Sponsors can be toxic to objectivity, including self-assessment or introspection (for example, a GNU/Linux site criticising GNU/Linux itself).

“You could discuss how Linux Magazine has been nothing but advertiser-led since 2001,” one reader urged us the other day, “maybe even earlier!”

It was about an article rejection at Linux Magazine back in 2001. “If I recall [correctly] it was 2001,” said the reader, “I was at Linux Biz Expo when Linus was still with Transmeta and other players – maddog, miguel Dirk, etc were speaking. Emmett Plant was the Editor in chief. I had pictures, I had interviews, I had a great article. But the ADVERTISERS… were not interested, at least that is what Emmett was told. The article — Globalization of Linux — never published. Maybe Larry (vaforge) was running Linux.com at that time.”

“Content,” explained this reader, was “not published because of advertisers.”

So surely this phenomenon is rather common. Now consider the impact of “LF Event” sponsorships on the Linux Foundation and Linux.com. The only time they wrote about me it was an attack on me and on Techrights. The theme was a familiar one: try to paint those whom you don’t agree with using the “conspiracy theories” or “paranoia” brush. The person who wrote that article now works for Linux Magazine. █

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EPO Benefits European Patent Trolls With Dodgy European Patents

Posted in Deception, Europe, Patents at 5:11 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Summary: The EPO is a stepping stone for parasitic entities looking to leverage patents for exploitative extortion rackets all over Europe; if they get their way, companies that manufacture and sell things will pay a hefty tax to those who create nothing at all and are often not European, either

EARLIER this year we wrote on a number of occasions about the European Patent Office (EPO) and Licensing Executives Society International (LESI) getting together; it was upsetting but not shocking because we had already seen the EPO getting together with patent parasites and trolls.

LESI now has this new press release about “[j]oint LESI-EPO training course for SMEs on technology commercialisation” (typical “SME” spin) and this was retweeted by EPO PR people yesterday, saying that they have “jointly developed 2-day training course, “Succeeding at Technology Commercialisation and Negotiation” to be held in Basel, Switzerland, 26 – 28 June.”

“The patent maximalists are like politicians who leverage “the kids” and “terrorism” in order to get their way. They use words like “pirates” and “theft” (when talking about similarity of things).”It’s bad enough that the EPO is liaising with front groups of patent trolls in another continent. António Campinos has done that several times before, reinforcing the perception that the EPO is a foe of European people and ally of large non-European multi-national corporations. This is more of what we have come to expect, having seen the EPO doing interviews with American patent extremists (sites that promote software patents and patent trolls, bash judges and bully officials). We’re thinking primarily (but not only) about Watchtroll. To give examples from this week, Eileen McDermott (editor) is now trying to paint software patents as “medical” — the new lie/trick of patent extremists. She calls it “diagnostics and computer-implemented inventions” as in (as per the summary): “Current patent eligibility concerns tend to tip the scales against patenting. Uncertainty about being able to get a patent and license it weighs against pursuing diagnostics and computer-implemented inventions—at least in the United States.”

Over at Watchtroll, software patents gradually become “computer-implemented inventions” (CII) and even though there is nothing inherently "medical" about algorithms they use terms like SaMD. This relatively new “medical” slant on software patents is designed to steer us into a moral panic, as in “if you don’t grant me software patents, then people will die!”

The patent maximalists are like politicians who leverage “the kids” and “terrorism” in order to get their way. They use words like “pirates” and “theft” (when talking about similarity of things).

Watchtroll also wrote this yesterday: “Recently, I’ve written several articles laying the blame for the patent eligibility crisis squarely on the Federal Circuit.”

So says Gene Quinn, who regularly attacks judges and courts which aren’t patent extremists like him. Paul Morinville does not get it either. Patents are a monopoly, yet he says “Startups with Patents are the Ultimate Anti-Monopoly” and was unable to put together a coherent argument when challenged over it last week. Startups are most vulnerable to patent lawsuits. Morinville and Quinn regularly bash PTAB (the equivalent of EPO judges) and promote software patents. These are the sorts of people the EPO nowadays chooses to associate with. But thankfully, Watchtroll is collapsing. The same is true for other such site. The patent microcosm in the US is in a state collapse/disarray. So their sites are rotting too. I remember when they used to regularly write articles. Actual articles. Analyses…

When not posting ads for events, Patent Docs reduces itself to marketing spam for companies that do privateering with patents (as it did yesterday). Patently-O barely even writes a single article per day now. It used to do several.

Going back to Europe, where does it stand on patents? Well, a couple of weeks ago we wrote about a European patent troll, Sisvel, targeting the Free software community by aiming software patents at Free/libre codecs. “The Alliance for Open Media Statement” has just been published to say:

The Alliance for Open Media (AOMedia) unites leading internet and media technology companies in a collaborative effort to offer open, royalty-free and interoperable solutions for the next generation of media delivery. AOMedia is aware of the recent third-party announcement attempting to launch a joint patent licensing program for AV1. AOMedia was founded to leave behind the very environment that the announcement endorses – one whose high patent royalty requirements and licensing uncertainty limit the potential of free and open online video technology. By settling patent licensing terms up front with the royalty-free AOMedia Patent License 1.0, AOMedia is confident that AV1 overcomes these challenges to help usher in the next generation of video-oriented experiences.

A large German patent troll has a lot to do with it, as well as the American front group, MPEG-LA, which is supported by Microsoft, Apple, and Nokia. They try to impose software patents on everything. In the case of video, Unified Patents keeps targeting Velos, as this post from yesterday reveals:

On April 8, 2019, Unified filed a petition (with Finnegan serving as lead counsel) for inter partes review (IPR) against U.S. Patent No. 9,100,634, owned by Velos Media, LLC (Velos), as part of Unified’s ongoing efforts in its SEP Video Codec Zone.

The ‘634 patent and its corresponding extended patent family is one of the largest families known to be owned by Velos. Including this petition, Unified has now challenged patents representing over 35% of Velos’ total known U.S. assets.

Unified Patents has already gone after several other patents of Velos and there’s this Microsoft-connected patent troll (Dominion Harbor armed by Intellectual Ventures) perishing in PTAB because Unified Patents makes new gains. Also on the subject of Microsoft, which truly turned Mokia into a patent troll (and troll feeder), mind this latest post at FOSSPatents. “My NokiaPlanP [Patents] is happening,” Benjamin Henrion wrote yesterday, citing this report:

It is high time that the automotive industry stopped being the ideal target of shakedown attempts by standard-essential patent (SEP) holders due to its sheer size, the high prices of its end products, and its pacifist attitude. For a long time, car makers used to be on the sidelines of major disputes. They generally resolved any IP issues out of court, respecting exclusionary rights in some cases and cross-licensing (or simply refraining from hostilities) in many others. But times have changed, and with cars increasingly becoming smartphones on wheels, those car makers are no longer dealing with a herd of sheep when it comes to patent assertions but have entered a jungle teeming with predators. As a result, they must confront those challenges more decisively, lest they be eaten alive.

Against this backdrop I’d like to promote (not getting anything for it) an upcoming Munich conference hosted by the Bardehle Pagenberg firm: Automotive Patent wars — To pay or not to pay: That is the question.” on May 9.

[...]

Having watched Nokia in litigation over many years (even going back to its first dispute with Apple), and the unfortunate (for Nokia and its stakeholders, though not for consumers) demise of its mobile device business that changed its attitude toward patent monetization, I’m not surprised that it apparently made demands that Daimler wasn’t willing to meet without a fight. Daimler is also defending itself against Broadcom’s German lawsuits (as is BMW).

The EPO has already adopted a bunch of new buzzwords and acronyms like SDV, which it used to disguise abstract patents "on a car". █

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The Myth of Quality of European Patents

Posted in Deception, Europe, Patents at 4:41 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Summary: Mythology associated with superior quality of European Patents is an antiquated notion (it used to be true a long time ago) and this, along with other factors (such as disrespect for judges), is why the Unified Patent Court (UPC) is almost certainly doomed for good

YESTERDAY and the day before that we wrote about the new European Patent Office (EPO) survey [1, 2], which claims to represent the views of staff but merely insults the staff (or the staff’s intelligence). The EPO has not mentioned it publicly, at least not yet; instead, yesterday it was tweeting and retweeting ‘results’ [1, 2], with new puff pieces like this one emerging. Not a word is said about patent quality, only quantity. António Campinos, who advocates software patents in Europe, already wrote to staff (internally) about patent quality, relying on vague pseudoscience and likely the same kind of distortion he used to tell staff that people are now happy(ier). Mike Gilbert and Jonathan Stafford, two patent maximalists from Marks & Clerk (the British litigation ‘industry’), have meanwhile commented somewhat belatedly on the highest British court finding European Patents to be invalid — yet again! To quote their spin of it:

In a long awaited decision, the UK Supreme Court (Lord Hodge giving the speech on behalf of a unanimous panel) has dismissed ICOS’s appeal against the Court of Appeal’s decision holding that its patent for a low dosage regimen for tadalafil for the treatment of erectile dysfunction was invalid for obviousness. Ultimately, the Supreme Court concluded that, under the specific circumstances of this case, a skilled team would have arrived at the claimed low dosage regimen without using inventive skill, as a result of conducting routine clinical experimentation. This is therefore an important decision for innovators seeking to obtain patent protection for new medical dosage regimen.

[...]

The Supreme Court accepted that the Court of Appeal had been correct to overturn the first instance decision. In essence, both the Court of Appeal and the Supreme Court held that the first instance judge had erred in principle by not appreciating the logical consequences of his finding as to whether the skilled team would continue tests on low doses of tadalafil and thus arrive at the claimed dose. In so doing, the Supreme Court adopted the step by step nuanced approach on the facts of the case, correctly leaving factual determinations made by the first instance judge untouched. In those circumstances, the Supreme Court held that the Court of Appeal was entitled to have overturned the first instance ruling.

The firm that authored the above is a booster of software patents (even in Europe), a proponent of patents on life, and a key player in UPC advocacy. Yesterday we showed how Marks & Clerk had even infiltrated Scottish media, where it is nowadays disguised as “journalism” while doing shameless self-marketing.

“The Supreme Court accepted that the Court of Appeal had been correct to overturn the first instance decision.”
      –Marks & ClerkSpeaking of the UPC, do not expect ‘unitary’ patents to come. European Patents are bad enough and making them ‘unitary’ would only exacerbate things (e.g. bypassing British courts like the above). UPC booster Thomas Adam (we assume a Brit living in Munich for litigation profits), desperate for some UPC spin (seeing that Team UPC has been entirely silent so far this month), has just attempted to twist something totally unrelated as pertaining to UPC: “Reviewing its competencies under the GDPR, a German administrative court (Verwaltungsgericht) considers itself non-compliant w the definition of independent and impartial courts of Art. 47(2) of the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights refers issue to CJEU. https://openjur.de/u/2169849.html […] Question b) of referral (abbrev.): “Is the referring court an independent & impartial court within the meanig of Art. 267 TFEU in conjunction with Art. 47(2) of the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights?” Impact on pending DE constitutional cases on independence of EPO BoA and UPC?!”

No. Not even close. Not connected. He recently (end of last month) spread some other insane/inane lies in an effort to influence the decision. These people know that the patents have little or no merit, so they want kangaroo (patent) courts. █

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