Bonum Certa Men Certa

The Unified Patent Court is Dead, But Doubts Remain Over the EPO's Appeal Boards' Ability to Rule Independently Against Patents on Nature and Code

SCOTUS has handed down Alice/Mayo (now in 35 U.S.C. €§ 101), but European judges (internal to the EPO) lack the independence US Justices have (lifelong tenures)

Harley day in Arnhem



Summary: Patents used to cover physical inventions (such as engines); nowadays this just isn't the case anymore and judges who can clarify these questions lack the freedom to think outside the box (and disobey patent maximalists' dogma)

"WHAT is a patent?"



I've asked some people that question, seeking to find out/understand their perception of this concept. Many got it totally wrong and false analogies contribute to misunderstandings, misconceptions, miscomprehended goals.

To a patent attorney or lawyer, patents mean money. The more, the merrier. They can never have "enough!" Moreover, patent lawsuits are the best 'products' to sell. No wonder many of them still drool over the UPC and they generally hate Alice/Mayo .

"The UPC is unconstitutional in a lot of nations, but almost none even bothered assessing the matter."In the United States, as we've just mentioned, courts don't agree with the patent office. They in fact disagree quite a lot. The situation in the European Union is similar (increasingly so over time). Courts are not tolerating software patents, but the European Patent Office (EPO) allows these and the Commission keeps promoting FRAND agenda together with the EPO. It's a gross attempt to let these patents creep in from the back door, bypassing actual courts. The same goes for the UPC, which is an attempt to replace the existing courts. The UPC is dead however. As noted yesterday, even "Nokia inhouse litigator just voiced skepticism of the Unified Patent Court materializing anytime soon in light of Brexit, German constitutional challenge, political climate in various countries for re-ratification."

Hungary has already ruled that unconstitutional anyway. Hungarian courts rather than politicians looked into it. The UPC is unconstitutional in a lot of nations, but almost none even bothered assessing the matter.

"So the EPO disregards the law and grants patents in defiance of the EPO. Who can stop it? The Boards of Appeal? Not likely."The lawlessness of the EPO is a really serious problem. EPO judges do not feel free to judge as they see fit. António Campinos can take them out of their job if he wishes; a colleague was already tortured after he had rejected a European software patent disguised as "medical" (but punished for allegedly passing around what many other people did too).

Yesterday, maybe for the dozenth time, the EPO spoke of "MedTech" as a semi-synonym for software patents when it published this tweet: "Businesses and commercialisation experts in the field of #MedTech should join this event" (we covered this before).

Aaron Gin and Bryan Helwig, messing around with buzzwords like "AI", have just said there "there has been substantial growth in AI-based medical device patent applications over the last decade..."

AI-based? They mean software-based.

Here's the New York Law Journal ("Alexa, Will I Be Able to Patent My Artificial Intelligence Technology This Year?") -- quite frankly as usual and as expected -- calling such patents "AI" as recently as yesterday.

The EPO loves and adores the term "AI"; it reveres anything that gets labeled "AI" as though it's revolutionary.

The EPO didn't stop there. They then (also yesterday) used "blockchain" patents (i.e. bogus software patents that should not be granted) as follows (calling it a "revolution"): "Talking about a new revolution: #blockchain. We report on our recent conference on the topic here..."

So the EPO disregards the law and grants patents in defiance of the EPC. Who can stop it? The Boards of Appeal? Not likely. As we recently noted, they lack the independence they need to stop software patents.

Rose Hughes from IP Kat has just spoken about the decision/referral that can potentially end these patents once and for all. In her own words:

Article 52 EPC specifies that methods for performing mental acts and computer programs are not considered inventions. They are excluded from patentability in so far as a claim relates to excluded subject matter "as such". Therefore, a claim directed to a computer implemented invention is considered patentable insofar as the claim causes "a further technical effect" (T 1173/97, Computer program product/IBM, Headnote). The question of the patentability of the claims is then shifted from an analysis of whether the claim is directed to excluded subject matter, to one of whether the claimed technical feature is novel and inventive (as established in T 154/04).

The EBA have previously considered a referral from the EPO President on the subject of computer implemented inventions (G 3/08, Programs for computers). Under Article 112(1)(b) EPC the EPO President may refer a question to the EBA where two Boards of Appeal have given different decisions on that question. The President at the time was Alison Brimelow. The EBA declined to hand down a decision, ruling that the President's referral was inadmissible because the EBA found no divergence in the Boards of Appeal case law justifying the referral (Headnote 7) (IPKat post here).

In G 3/08 the EBA nonetheless reiterated the previous view of the TBA in T 1173/97, Computer program product/IBM, that computer implemented inventions are patenable insofar as they claim "a further technical effect". This approach has been followed by subsequent TBAs and is outlined in the EPO Guidelines for Examination 2018. The Guidelines also provides examples of what is considered a "further technical effects". Programs for processing code at low level, such as builders or compilers, for example, "may well have a technical character".

An assessment of the patentability of a computer implemented invention is therefore dependent on a separation of the "technical" and "non-technical" features of the claim. However, making the distinction between the technical and non-technical features is not always straightforward, given the potentially complex interaction between such features.


Over at Managing Intellectual Property, Jakob Pade Frederiksen has meanwhile spoken about "[t]wo issues [that] have arisen recently causing the Technical Boards of Appeal to refer questions to the Enlarged Board of Appeal (EBA)."

"Are patents on cooking recipes next? The USPTO has some notorious patents on the making of sandwiches."One of these issues is the independence of the Boards. In his own words: "by decision T 831/17 of February 25, an Appeal Board referred questions relating to (1) the right for oral proceedings, (2) a third party's possible right to appeal, and (3) the venue of oral proceedings in appeal. In relation to the third issue, in particular the EBA is to consider if the president or the Administrative Council of the EPO had the powers to move the Boards of Appeals' premises to Munich suburb Haar in 2017. In late 2016 the chairmen of the Boards of Appeal of the EPO adopted a resolution objecting to the relocation of the Boards of Appeal to Haar. At that time the issue appeared to be of a purely political nature, but now the matter is clearly becoming a legal one."

Nicolas Marro and Bérengère Boudeau have meanwhile written about European Patents on life, noting that "the EPO practice concerning Mab sequence identity appears rather variable, all the more so given that there is no official guideline in this area. A journey through Board of Appeal decisions and examination files nonetheless enables certain conclusions to be drawn in order for applicants to be in a better position to handle examination proceedings."

Hughes expanded on the same day, taking note of the EPO's practice of granting patents on nature and life itself, specifically in relation to the CRISPR case. In her words:

A year ago, IPKat reported on the decision by the opposition division (OD) of the European Patent Office (EPO) to revoke the Broad Institute's EP patent for CRISPR/Cas-9 technology (IPKat post here). Given the undeniable commercial importance of CRISPR, the Broad appealed the OD decision (T0844/18).The Broad's Statement of Grounds of Appeal (and the Opponents' responses) are a thought-provoking read for anyone with an interest in the concept of priority in Europe.

For a full background of the case and the EPO's established approach to priority, see IPKat here. In brief, the OD decision for the CRISPR case was in line with the large body of EPO case law on priority. The case law states that the right to claim priority from an earlier application according to Article 87 EPC is afforded to the applicant of the earlier application and to no other party. The Broad's CRISPR EP patent (EP2771468) was based on a PCT filing (WO 2014204729) claiming priority from a number of US provisional applications. One of the US provisionals named an inventor-applicant who was not named on the PCT application. The EP patent was thus revoked in view of an invalid priority claim.



In that same blog, a comment has meanwhile appeared which bemoans examination. "Ron" wrote:

You might be surprised at the number of unclear patents that exist! When I was a trainee UK examiner under the last days of the 1949-Act my trainer showed us a number of "Friday afternoon" patents as things to watch out for, such as claims not supported by the description, and one such was is this situation in a real infringement action I was involved in. Unfortunately, if the point is not raised in examination, it is not a ground of revocation, a lacuna in my view. This sort of thing is all the more likely nowadays. Under the 1949 Act, it was an essential part of an examiner's duties to read the entire description to ensure it made sense. Come the 1977 Act, such detailed examination was deemed unnecessary as examiners no longer had to write detailed abridgments of the total disclosure. When patents became more "sexy", and higher management positions in the Patent Office became progressively occupied by DTI generalists rather than examiners who had progressed up from the coal face, "efficiency" (disposing of the maximum cases in the minimum time, with salary progression determined by achieving disposal targets, regardless of quality) has become more important, meaning that policy has been to reduce the amount of intellectual examination work done by examiners. This is evident from the Manual of Patent Practice. There was even a proposal a few years ago (not adopted, at least officially) that examiners would no longer examine the description at all, but just search the claims. The post-Batistelli EPO, which used to have rigourous examination, now seems to operate on similar lines.

Thus it can be expected that practitioners will meet more unclear patents in the future.


Hughes wrote again some hours ago about another kind of ridiculous European Patents. First we saw patents on beer (this is actually being done, in relation to underlying seeds, thanks to the EPO's greed) and now "bakers [are] seeking to protect bread-related inventions." [sic]

Here are some jaw-dropping cases:

The broad definition of bread, and the consequent broad range of prior art, presents challenges to innovative bakers seeking to protect bread-related inventions. In the Board of Appeals decision T 1296/04, the patentee argued that their claim directed to a method for making bread, was not invalidated by prior art relating to pizza dough. Claim 1 of the granted patent (EP 0883348) in question specified a method including the steps of preparing the dough, rolling out the dough into a flat strip, cutting the strip of dough into pieces, baking the flat pieces of dough in an oven for 2-8 minutes at 250-270ۼC and cooling.

The Board of Appeal found that the claim lacked novelty in view of prior art describing pizza dough. Pizza dough was considered bread despite the addition of a small amount of oil. The only difference between the claimed method and that of the prior art was therefore identified as the specified temperature range. However, the claimed sub-range was found not to be sufficiently narrow compared to the prior art range of 204-316ۼ C.

[...]

The smell of bread, or more precisely "bread aroma" was the subject matter of granted patent EP0413368, bringing to mind the Peruvian fable The Theft of Smell. The claims of EP0413368are directed towards a method for preparing bread flour extract, particularly rye-bread extract, characterized by use of an organic solvent as an extracting agent. The description indicates that the rye-bread aroma can be used to flavour beer and other products. Thankfully, unlike in the fable, the patentee seeks to protect a process of making bread aroma, as opposed to the smell of bread itself.


Are patents on cooking recipes next? The USPTO has some notorious patents on the making of sandwiches.

These patents represent not an invention. They're bogus patents. Also abstract ones. Since when is nature an invention? Or mathematics (laws of nature)?

Recent Techrights' Posts

Some Large German Media Covers Richard Stallman's Talks in Germany Earlier This Week
LLM-based chatbots are just "bullshit generators" (as he has long called them)
Trouble in Red Hat/IBM and a Retreat to Ponzi Economics in Search of Wall Street Market Heist
Would you invest your life savings in this kind of crap?
Who Asked Software in the Public Interest (SPI) for a Refund? ($100,000, Resulting in Losses of $267,201 in 12 Months, Highest-Ever Losses)
The IRS does not reveal who or what's tied to this refund (or the cause/reason)
 
Why We Support Richard Stallman and You Probably Should Too
It's not about being "Richard Stallman fan", it is about maintaining the right to hold positions (on technology) like his
Linux Foundation Uses LLM Slop to Promote Microsoft in Linux.com (Again), Rendering It a Linux-Hostile Slopfarm
Openwashing with slop by "Linux.com Editorial Staff", which basically seems to be a bot
Links 23/10/2025: Windows TCO Galore and "The Internet Is Going to Break Again"
Links for the day
Social engineering attack: Debian voted to trick you on binary blobs
Reprinted with permission from Daniel Pocock
Techrights Will Always Stand for Women's Rights
We even invest money - personal savings that it - in our principles
Certified Lawyers Should Know Better (Than to Intimidate Us With Man Who Drives on Motorcycle Through a Really Bad Storm Between Distant Cities, Then Collects Photos of Our Home)
Mentioning someone was in prison for bad things isn't a crime, it's a public service
The "AI" (Slop) Bubble is Already Imploding
"ChatGPT Usage Has Peaked and Is Now Declining, New Data Finds"
The So-called "Sexy" Buckets (AI, Quantum) Cannot Save IBM From Reality, Shares Tank
"No matter how much financial hocus-pocus they use to reclassify revenues to land in the "sexy" buckets (AI, Quantum), it still smells old and musty - just like this company."
Paul Krugman is Wrong About the Scope of Mass Layoffs in the United States
A few years ago society was accelerating its journey towards feudalism, boosted by COVID-19
Links 23/10/2025: Proprietary Blunders and CISA's Latest Disclosure of Holes
Links for the day
Gemini Links 23/10/2025: Fast Past (F1), 99.9% Uptime
Links for the day
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Wednesday, October 22, 2025
IRC logs for Wednesday, October 22, 2025
Slopwatch: Google News is Promoting Fake 'Articles' About Fake Xubuntu, Fake Articles About Replacing Windows With GNU/Linux
The quality of the Web deteriorates and unless someone cleans up the mess, real sites will lose an incentive to produce anything
When "AI Layoffs" Mean Layoffs Due to the "AI" Bubble Popping
many people that are laid off by Microsoft claim to be specialists in "AI"
Mysterious grant forfeited, $100,000 from Software in the Public Interest accounts 2023
Reprinted with permission from Daniel Pocock
Evidence: bullying, student union behaviour: Armijn Hemel's FSFE resignation
Reprinted with permission from Daniel Pocock
Evidence: psychological abuse, stalking, Galia Mancheva, Susanne Eiswirt ignored by FSFE judgment for Matthias Kirschner
Reprinted with permission from Daniel Pocock
Helping FSFE scam victims and conference organisers
Reprinted with permission from Daniel Pocock
Nigerian fraud in FSFE constitution
Reprinted with permission from Daniel Pocock
Worrying and Amusing Stories of "Clown Computing" Gone Awry
Many of these disasters could be avoided
Links 22/10/2025: Amazon Plans to Replace Workers With Robotics, AWS and Clown Computing in General Ridiculed
Links for the day
Gemini Links 22/10/2025: Niri Completely Changes Multitasking and Overview of Diff-ers
Links for the day
Links 22/10/2025: Study on Misinformation by Slop and Heavily Debt-Sabbled Microsoft OpenAI (ClosedSlop) Uses "Browser" as Gimmick/Distraction
Links for the day
They've Already Spent Close to a Million Dollars on Lawyers and Sent Us About 50 KG of Legal Papers (Sponsored by Mysterious Third Party) to Try to Censor Techrights, Without Success
They try to overcompensate with sheer volume for a lack of solid, clear arguments (we are the victims here)
12 Months Ago the 'Hulk Hogan of UEFI' Officially Went 'Tag-Team'
We're actually sort of flattered or proud that such despicable people are so desperate to censor us
"Cloud Computing" Was Always a Joke, But This Week Was the Punchline
Maybe stop following tech trends and fashions
"Cloud Computing" Does Not Mean Safety
Fault tolerance is related to the notion of software freedom
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Tuesday, October 21, 2025
IRC logs for Tuesday, October 21, 2025
The Fall of Windows: From Something to Nothing
Of course Microsoft will pretend everything is fine and "just trust the hey hi" (AI)
Sounds Like Fedora is Ready to Become Less of a Slave of Microsoft (GitHub)
This seems like a belated move in a positive direction
XBox is a Dead Microsoft Product in a Dying Industry
It's probable that another wave of XBox layoffs is just over the horizon (maybe even before month's end)
Progress on Techrights Site Search
Fun times
IBM's Bluewashing of Red Hat Means the Layoffs Are Silent, Barely Reported
Don't wait to hear about "Red Hat layoffs"
Gemini Links 21/10/2025: Happy Disconnection, AWS Falling Apart, Closing of Gemlog Blue
Links for the day
Full Audio of Today's Richard Stallman Talk in the Technical University of Munich
Free/Libre software and freedom in the digital society
Microsoft XBox is Just Vapourware (Promises of Hardware That Doesn't Exist), Real Products Perish
just as developers lose interest in developing for XBox Microsoft is increasing the costs imposed upon them
Slopwatch: Fake Articles (Slop) in "Linux" Clothing in Google News (Noise)
all about what Google does
Links 21/10/2025: Even "Inventor of Vibe Coding" Rejects Vibe Coding, USPTO Experiments With Slop in Examination
Links for the day
Richard Stallman Talk Now Available for Viewing (Archived Copy, Not Live-streamed)
This recording is over 2 hours old
Links 21/10/2025: AWS-Induced Chaos and Social Control Media Curbs
Links for the day
Gemini Links 21/10/2025: Programming, StarGrid, Brand-New Palm OS Strategy Game in 2025, and Chatbot as Addiction Mechanisms
Links for the day
The African Lion and the American Cowards
Safaris exist for people to watch and enjoy animals
Amazon Web Shenanigans Perfectly Timed for Today's Talk by Richard Stallman
Maybe listen to him instead of looking for excuses to ridicule the messenger
Mission:Libre Has Taken Off (Project by Carmen Maris)
there will be a lot more to report on next month (after the event)
Techrights to Publish More EPO Leaks Next Week
We're meanwhile also doing lots of work on search, whose interface now looks better
Links 21/10/2025: 'The Lost Art' of Neon Signs and Twitter (X) to Enable Identity Theft (or Handle Theft) as a Service
Links for the day
Plagiarism With LLM Slop: Hindustan Times (HT Digital Streams Limited) Has Become a Slop Factory/Hub
What a disgrace
A radical proposal to keep your personal data safe, by Richard Stallman
"The surveillance imposed on us today is worse than in the Soviet Union. We need laws to stop this data being collected in the first place"
Next Week We Launch Search at Techrights
We're planning to launch it some time next week. Maybe Tuesday, maybe Thursday.
Talk by Richard Stallman Will be Live-streamed in Less Than 10 Hours
Happy hacking
"No Kings" in the Software World (GAFAM Should Not Exist, Either)
"No Kings" is a good slogan. Let's start by ridding ourselves of masters, not only those who reside in DC or visit DC
Every Morning
Bugs/edge cases combined with automation can spell disaster
Insane, Deliberately Dishonest, or Just Another Bigot?
very intellectually-dishonest human being
A Lot of Techrights is Built on Perl
Perl also runs the sister site
The Register MS Selling Slop for Microsoft (Vapourware, Ponzi Scheme, False Claims)
What will be left of The Register MS if it keeps repeating falsehoods and looking to profit from Ponzi schemes?
analytics.usa.gov Says Less Than 14% of Web Requests (to Government Sites) Come From Vista 11
Vista 11 was released more than 4 years ago!
People Who Attempt to Take Down Correct Information Need a Doctor a Day
“Journalism is printing something that someone does not want printed. Everything else is public relations.” ― George Orwell
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Monday, October 20, 2025
IRC logs for Monday, October 20, 2025
Vista 11 is Sinking While Microsoft is PIPing (Mass Layoffs But Silent Layoffs)
We're witnessing a shift in platform dominance
Richard Stallman is Having a Good Week Already (Stallman Was Right About 'Clown Computing')
That alone is worth bringing up in his talk
An Update About Soylent News, With Jan Rinok "Back in the Saddle"
Burnout or "near burnout" a possibility when having to curate abuse
When Prominent GNU/Linux Distros Are Run by Spies
What has Microsoft Canonical become?
More Publishers and Companies Nowadays Say "GNU/Linux", Not "Linux"
It's not to see InstallAware saying GNU/Linux this week