Bonum Certa Men Certa

Software Patents Advocacy and UPC Lies Go Hand in Hand

Hand in Hand



Summary: The push for UPC, which accompanies the lobby for software patents in Europe, is still based on a large pile of lies and false projections of commencement

Has crooked Benoît Battistelli corrupted enough European/French media at the expense of EPO users (stakeholders, applicants) for this media to ignore his serious abuses of the law if not overt corruption? In a new article from AFP (France), mentioning Battistelli and António Campinos (the two Frenchmen who are friends), we are seeing little more than classic talking points and even lies. "Brevet unitaire européen: l'OEB est prêt, assure son président" is the headline and is has been cross-posted by various French-speaking sites, e.g. [1, 2].



"Where are the European authorities/authoritarians? Where are all the French politicians? When will they understand that the EPO under Battistelli has become an enormous liability for their reputation?"The EPO has become a loose monster, totally out of control and without anything that resembles accountability, let alone oversight. The EPO has long misused its budget to corrupt/pay/bribe the media, to corrupt academia, to pay for illegal spying and to hire several law firms to bully yours truly among other critics.

Where are the European authorities/authoritarians? Where are all the French politicians? When will they understand that the EPO under Battistelli has become an enormous liability for their reputation? The UPC is an EU thing, unlike the EPO. It cannot go on like this; it's highly damaging to Europe. A couple of days ago europa.eu published this programme from the Competitiveness Council (due to start tomorrow). See the part which says:

Any other business: (not in public session) - Unitary Patent and Unified Patent Court


Is the EU hiding the fact that it promotes a ruinous conspiracy of law firms eager to shatter the European industry for the sake of legal bills? Will they listen to/learn why Spain, one of the largest EU economies, refuses to participate in UPC?

Apparently not...

"Will they listen to/learn why Spain, one of the largest EU economies, refuses to participate in UPC?"Going a little further back in time, we're seeing Team UPC publicly promoting the lie that the UK is ready to participate (it cannot!) and articles that we missed at the time include this one from Roger Green (Watermark Intellectual Property), another one from WilmerHale (also published in the same lawyers' sites at the time), and even this from ElectronicsWeekly (odd place to find such a thing). "Unitary Patents almost a reality," says one headline. That's untrue.

An article by Tim Wilson of Dehns (part of Team UPC) was published a couple of days ago under the title "The Value Of Patenting Software Innovation" (the overlap between UPC boosters and software patents lobbyists has been noted here for over half a decade). To quote Wilson:

Software is a relative new-comer to the patent arena. Over the last few decades, government patent offices have struggled to decide how to deal with software patents. There is a widely-held view that software simply can't be patented, particularly in Europe. Fortunately, this is not at all correct: the right type of software innovation can most certainly be patented in all the world's major patent offices.

Dehns Partner, Tim Wilson, recently hosted a seminar on this topic and provided strategies for maximising the prospects of getting a software patent successfully granted. Below is a summary of key points from the seminar, as well as examples of a few questions that came up.


"Yetserday IP Kat's Tian Lu promoted the lobbying event of patent extremists under the wing of the leading software patents lobbyist, the Intellectual Property Owners Association (IPO)."Also a couple of days ago there was this article by Charles Bond and John Coldham (Gowling WLG) about the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU), which Team UPC often relates to UPC, pretending that Brexit is somehow -- miraculously enough -- still compatible with UPC (it's not).

Yetserday IP Kat's Tian Lu promoted the lobbying event of patent extremists under the wing of the leading software patents lobbyist, the Intellectual Property Owners Association (IPO). IPO’s 2018 European Practice Committee Conference, based on this first part of two, is a total farce. It's also farcical based on who's attending. No balance at all. They're lobbying on 35 U.S.C. €§ 101, against PTAB, for software patents etc. Does Lu realise what (or whose) agenda she's promoting?

"It cannot be stressed strongly enough that UPC would be a Trojan horse by which to bypass national laws forbidding software patents; Team UPC knows that and it's one among many reasons it lobbies so hard for the UPC, oftentimes making up false statements in the process.""On May 3rd," she wrote, "the 2018 European Practice Committee Conference organized by IPO’s European Practice Committee took place at InterContinental Amstel Amsterdam, the much-loved landmark on the Amstel River banks with more than 150 years of elegance."

A couple of days ago we also found this new "Newsletter" about Italy. "Software is not patentable in and of itself," it says, but then it names the EPO's tricks for bypassing the rule:

Software is not patentable in and of itself, as under Article 45 of the Industrial Property Code (and the corresponding Article 52 of the European Patent Convention) it belongs to a group of innovations that "are not considered as inventions". As a result, a piece of software's source code and its external appearance on a computer screen, rather than the ideas behind them, can be protected by copyright. However, Article 45 of the Industrial Property Code specifies that this scenario applies only if the software is "considered as such". If the software is used in a new and inventive way to solve a technical problem that goes beyond the mere operation of the computer on which it is installed or in particular, is used to operate a machine or a system external to the computer (eg, a lighting system), it becomes patentable.

Further, when an invention consists of a concrete (and not purely abstract) scheme of links that allows a computer system to operate, this scheme becomes patentable. The European Patent Office guidelines state that:


"if the claim specifies computers, computer networks or other conventional programmable apparatus, a program therefor, or a storage medium carrying the program, for executing at least some steps of a scheme, it may comprise a mix of technical and non-technical features, with the technical features directed to a computer or a comparable programmed device. In these cases, the claim is to be examined as a 'computer-implemented invention."


Such a scheme is patentable under the usual conditions for all inventions – namely, where it is new, inventive, lawful, susceptible to industrial application and described in a way that allows an expert in the field to implement it. Italian case law has long recognised the validity of computer-implemented inventions. The landmark case in this regard is a 2004 decision regarding an online system for the rental of holiday homes by means of special software.


It cannot be stressed strongly enough that UPC would be a Trojan horse by which to bypass national laws forbidding software patents; Team UPC knows that and it's one among many reasons it lobbies so hard for the UPC, oftentimes making up false statements in the process. Why is the media so silent about that? We have a rough idea.

Recent Techrights' Posts

Even Microsoft (MSN) Covers Richard Stallman's Public Talk in Milan 2 Days Ago
He spoke in Spanish earlier this month (Alicante)
Very High Attendance Level at Richard Stallman's Talk Shows People Can Relate to His Message
Smear campaigns have their limits
 
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
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
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
Gemini Links 28/05/2025: Celsius-Fahrenheit, Endless Scrolling/Infinite Scrolling, and Trapping LLM Slop Bots
Links for the day
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
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
Links 27/05/2025: Science Defunded, India Arrests an Academic
Links for the day
Gemini Links 27/05/2025: From Celsius to Fahrenheit and Deleting Social Control Media
Links for the day
Microsofters Have, in Effect, Attempted Extrajudicial Action Against Us
Courts and Judges (or Masters) don't exist to facilitate this kind of "bro" culture
UK High Court Masters Are Not Your Jesters, Microsoft
Judges aren't there for "funny" spectacles, they're there to act as arbiters in critical cases, not SLAPPs
Links 27/05/2025: Mass Layoffs at Volvo and More Evidence of 'AI' (Slop) Being a Passing Fad
Links for the day
The Code of Conduct (CoC) Gaslighting Phenomenon
There are still many people and projects foolish enough to outsource their labour to Microsoft via GitHub
They're Very Jealous of Richard Stallman and His Freedom (or Simple Lifestyle)
Jealousy is toxic because it can cause rational people to act irrationally and even severely harm themselves
Akira Urushibata on GNU coreutils
new message
Anouk Rozestraten (Deputy Director) Appears to Have Left the Free Software Foundation
Let's hope Rozestraten is still using and promoting Free software
There's Nothing Funny About Lawbreaking
There's plenty of room in society for humour, but "hacking" the state by breaking laws isn't cool or hip
More Mass Layoffs Coming Soon to Microsoft, Just a Question of When and How Many
Numbers from Washington were close to 5% and judging by prior rumours, it would be 5% + 5% (total 10%) at a later month
Links 27/05/2025: Bikes, Ideal Computers, and BYO
Links for the day
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Monday, May 26, 2025
IRC logs for Monday, May 26, 2025
Richard Stallman's Milan Talk (Public Presentation) Was Packed, Video Available Soon
Looks like they even ran out of seats
Gemini Links 26/05/2025: Intangible Stuff and Slop Issues
Links for the day
The Openwashing Shills Initiative (OSI) - Part I: Complaints to IRS or USDOJ Needed
If enough people do it, this will be more effective, more so if people who are based in the US do it
Open Source Initiative (OSI) Lobbying and the OSI's Status at Stake
At the end we plan to summarise all the issues in one very long article
Breaking Into Other People's Devices Without Authorisation Isn't "Funny" or "Research"
“Chaos was the law of nature; order was the dream of man.”
The Issue Isn't the Internet, the Issue is How People Are Taught to Use or Misuse It
The Web is circling down the drain. The Internet is not.
A Healed Reputation of a Movement's Leader and His Robust Message
The more aggressively you push against resistors, the more credibility they will gain
Links 26/05/2025: Deletions from Microsoft's GitHub, Telegram Blocked in Vietnam
Links for the day
Linux Released Last Night and There's Already LLM Slop With Slop Images
BetaNoise does not seem to mind this anymore
Links 26/05/2025: Walmart Layoffs and DRM Dumpster Fire ('Old' Fire TV Devices Lose Netflix Access)
Links for the day
Gemini Links 26/05/2025: USB Camera Viewer and Fantasy Life
Links for the day
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Sunday, May 25, 2025
IRC logs for Sunday, May 25, 2025