A lot more than just a patent office...

Summary: For increased influence/power/profit as well as for the personal gain of patent lawyers and their richest clients (usually companies from other continents, with a track record of hazardous patent aggression) the European Patent Office (EPO) continues to promote the UPC, despite it being well outside the scope of the EPO to decide on

"Here's our latest webinar on the Unitary Patent," the EPO wrote earlier today. They can't help themselves, can they? The EPO's lobbying for UPC (at whose expense? The public's expense!) has got to stop. It promotes the self-discrediting ideas or the growing perception that laws in Europe are decided on by those who profit from them, irrespective of the interests of ordinary Europeans or even European businesses. EPO management has done a lot to legitimise such damaging perceptions. Whose office is it? The Office is just run by Europeans but not for Europeans.

Incidentally, also earlier today there was this post titled "Much Ado About Patents" from IP Kat. It alluded to the UPC and stated: "What do validation rates in EPO patents tell us? These and more questions were subject to economic scrutiny at this morning's CREATe and Queen Mary hosted workshop."

"The UPC needs to be dumped. It offers nothing whatsoever to Europe and a lot to non-European actors and their European patent lawyers (agents of corporate occupation)."Well, that's assuming the speakers are truly independent and the workshop wasn't set up with an agenda in mind. It didn't take long for UPC to creep into it: "Leading into the Unitary Patent, there are some interesting questions on the interaction between national patents and EPO bundled patents. Are these patents complements, substitutes or neither? (Do patentees get both national and EPO patents, one or the other, or some other combination?) We have very little understanding as to how these work together on a systematic basis. (We know similarly little about the relationship between national and community trade marks and designs.)"

"Overall," said the author, "the research suggests that EPO and national patents are complements, and not substitutes."

So now they want to have not only multiple patent offices (for different jurisdictions) but also multiple patent courts, one for the nation and another for the continent/superstate. What happens if one rules for/against an infringement claims and another does the opposite? This is utterly ridiculous! The UPC needs to be dumped. It offers nothing whatsoever to Europe and a lot to non-European actors and their European patent lawyers (agents of corporate occupation). The UPC is just a Trojan horse. ⬆