Bonum Certa Men Certa

At EPO, “Producing Stronger Patents (or Being Able to Produce Them) is Also a Matter of Professional Pride for the Examiners”

If the EPO produced an academic journal, nobody would subscribe to read it

Journals
"Peer Review for Journals: Evidence on Quality Control, Fairness, and Innovation," J. Scott Armstrong, The Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania



Summary: Producing European Patents (EPs) that are solid and have merit is still a priority for examiners at the European Patent Office (EPO), but not for the management

THE ACCELERATION of granting, to be followed by accelerated litigation, is a horrible legacy of Battistelli. PPH, Early Certainty, PACE, UPC etc. are designed to tilt the system in favour of bullies and patent trolls, not actual inventors. It is basically a rather gross distortion of what the patent system (not only in Europe) was intended to do and supposed to accomplish. Patent examiners are clever enough to understand this, whereas Battistelli and his unqualified team understand nothing but power and leverage (and gratuitous bonuses for themselves).



"The worryingly low quality of patents (EPs) granted over the past few years threatens to engulf Europe with litigation; UPC would give such litigation even more 'teeth'."The UPC is quite likely dead, but the EPO's management tries to float it in headlines like these ones from the past 24 hours [1, 2].

"Germany and the UK still need to ratify the Unified Patent Court Agreement before the unitary patent system can come into force," one article says. "Once a European patent has been granted, a separate, simple post-grant procedure can be initiated at the EPO with a view to obtaining a Unitary Patent," says the other. But there is no UPC yet and there may never be UPC at all. Nor should be...

The worryingly low quality of patents (EPs) granted over the past few years threatens to engulf Europe with litigation; UPC would give such litigation even more 'teeth'. Who would suffer the most? Vulnerable people/companies like SMEs. They cannot even afford going to court for patent justice.

We expect the UPC nonsense to resume (a lot of misinformation about it) next week when more people return from holiday. They'll probably just pretend that the UPC is around the corner to benefit SMEs when in fact neither is true.

Yesterday we spotted this discussion in IP Kat's last post about EPO scandals. It's about patent quality:

If Ford can make cars with acceptable quality for the driver, and safety for the public, does everyone need to pay the price for a gold-plated Rolls-Royce, and experience the delay while it is hand made?

Admittedly, you might not want a Trabbi from the USPTO, but shouldn't there be a happy medium?


Days later came this response:

fair point indeed. Only in the past 30 years the Ford production did not decrease quality but instead tremendously increased it.

At the EPO the contrary occured. Come on face it, accept it and let us not whine about it but redress it. Nothing more nothing less.

Producing stronger patents (or being able to produce them) is also a matter of professional pride for the examiners, thus allowed to do their work as they should and not to cut corners.

Not sure you would currently like to step in in a Ford built by EPO staff given the way they are forced to work


The analogy can go further to say that Battistelli has turned the EPO from something sort of scholarly into a mere production line where truth matters not, only so-called 'production'. No wonder examiners are not tolerating it.

Recent Techrights' Posts

People's Understanding of the History of GNU/Linux is Changing
RMS is not a radical, he's just clever enough to see and foresee what's going on
Microsofters Were Scheming to Take Over This Entire Web Site (in Their Own Words!)
Money gets spent censoring/deplatforming people who speak about real issues; no money gets spent actually tackling those underlying issues
Bicycles for the Minds and the Story Harrison Bergeron
"The goal of having people in charge of the tools they use and that the tools should amplify ability" has long been abandoned
[Video] Cory Doctorow Explains DMCA: DRM in the Browser (or Webapp) Will "Make It a Felony to Protect Your Privacy While You Use It."
Pycon US Keynote Speaker Cory Doctorow
 
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Thursday, May 29, 2025
IRC logs for Thursday, May 29, 2025
Links 29/05/2025: Chinese Cracking Against EU Institutions (Prague), More Assaults on Media and Its Funding Sources
Links for the day
EPO Workers Caution That the Officials Are Still Illegally Trying to Replace Staff With Slop (to Lower Quality and Validity of European Patents)
Nobody in Europe voted for any of this
Links 29/05/2025: US Health Deficit and Malware Disguised as Slop Generator
Links for the day
Links 29/05/2025: Turtle Roadkill, Modern 'Tech' as a Sting
Links for the day
Thanks for All the Fish, Linux Format
people who once wrote for it (or for other magazines) comment on the importance of this news
Links 29/05/2025: YouTube Problem and Giant Privacy Hole in Microsoft OneDrive
Links for the day
United States Courts With Sworn Testimonies Are on Our Side, We'll Present the Same Here
Chronicling what happened is a moral imperative
Serial Sloppers Ruin and Lessen the Incentive to Cover "Linux"
The Serial Sloppers (SSs) ought to be named and shamed, but almost nobody does this
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Wednesday, May 28, 2025
IRC logs for Wednesday, May 28, 2025
Links 28/05/2025: 'Emulation Layers' (Measurements and Linguistics), Libraries, and Discomfort
Links for the day
Links 28/05/2025: More Arrests for Bitcoin-Connected Torture and Prosecutions for Dieselgate-Linked Executives
Links for the day
Even Microsoft (MSN) Covers Richard Stallman's Public Talk in Milan 2 Days Ago
He spoke in Spanish earlier this month (Alicante)
Gemini Links 28/05/2025: Techo-authoritarianism With Slop Plagiarism and "No Online June" (Going Offline)
Links for the day
Links 28/05/2025: GitHub MCP Exploited and MathWorks Discovers Huge Windows TCO
Links for the day
Very High Attendance Level at Richard Stallman's Talk Shows People Can Relate to His Message
Smear campaigns have their limits
Gemini Links 28/05/2025: Celsius-Fahrenheit, Endless Scrolling/Infinite Scrolling, and Trapping LLM Slop Bots
Links for the day
Prison gate backdrop to baptism by Fr Sean O'Connell, St Paul's, Coburg
Reprinted with permission from Daniel Pocock
More Photos From This Week's Milan Talk by Richard Stallman
The posts are in Italian, not English
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Tuesday, May 27, 2025
IRC logs for Tuesday, May 27, 2025