Bonum Certa Men Certa

Patent Trolls Destroy the European Economy Because EPO Gives Them Questionable Patents

Demolishing crane eating the building



Summary: The EPO's lust for patents (as many as possible, as that's what productivity or "success" will be measured by) is a blessing not for European businesses but for those eager to prey on them

NOTHING is improving at the European Patent Office (EPO), certainly not the quality of granted patents. António Campinos can smile and flatter himself all he wants, but he hasn't done a darn thing to improve matters, except at the most superficial level (like silencing the union and representatives*). He or his administration is aggressively promoting European software patents, which are favoured among patent trolls.

"How long can the EPO grant patents on nature, life, maths and even food without the public retaliating?"The EPO doesn't speak about "software patents"; it uses all sorts of sneaky buzzwords such as "AI". One can see Bristows LLP staff getting slapped down for spreading "AI" hype and lies a few days ago. To quote the comment: "Stop taking us for simple minds and define something as being intelligent which actually only is something defined by a programmer."

We used to write a lot of articles about this "AI" hype and how it relates to patents. We no longer do this as it would seem repetitive. Last week Bastian Best wrote: "AI and patents: Does the @EPOorg grant software patents for text document classifiers?"

Those classifiers aren't "AI" but algorithms; The EPO will typically grant software patents if one calls them "AI", however, so Best's colleague Patrick Heckeler wrote (without invoking this buzzwords nonsense) that it is considered "non-technical", as per the Board:

As a result, the Board ruled that a the claimed mathematical algorithm does not contribute to the technial character of the claimed method. The only implementation features specified in the claim are references to the method being “computerized” and the text documents being “digitally represented in a computer”. The skilled person, when given the task of implementing the algorithm, would certainly have chosen to represent text documents “digitally in a computer”. The Board further considers that the skilled person, using only his common general knowledge, would have had


Bastian Best did a post of his own and said aloud: "Data modelling is hardly patentable in Europe, at least on an abstract level..."

There's a case (referral to the Board) coming soon that can eliminate every such patent (by mean of legal extrapolation). There may also be a decision to end patents on seeds and plants some time soon (see "Open-source seeds: protecting new crops from privitisation", a new article written by Katie Burton).

How long can the EPO grant patents on nature, life, maths and even food without the public retaliating?

We have sadly seen IAM rearing its ugly face again in recent days. It gave a platform for Team Battistelli and then wrote: "The @EPOorg received over 7,000 4IR-related patent applications in 2017, says Yann Meniere the office's chief economist..." [sic]

More buzzwords for software patents from the EPO. How does he even define "4IR" and classify patents accordingly? It's pseudoscience. This man is a pseudo 'scientist', who calls himself an "economist" when all he really did was perpetuation of Battistelli's lies (that's his real job).

IAM also proceeded to promoting a patent troll, as it so habitually does (it's paid for it). "Big news from Sisvel this morning," it wrote, "the launch of a new licensing programme covering VP9 and AV1 video compression technology. Should cause a few waves!"

It linked to this puff piece outside the paywall: (to help the troll)

Sisvel has announced that it is launching a new platform which will license patents reading on the VP9 video encoding format, made available by Google in June 2013, and the AV1 (AOMedia Video 1) open video coding format developed by the Alliance for Open Media (a consortium founded in 2015 by Apple, ARM, Cisco, Facebook, Google, IBM, Intel, Microsoft, Mozilla and Netflix), the first version of which was released in June 2018.

Both VP9 and AV1 have been described as royalty free, but Sisvel claims that there are a number of innovators whose patent protected inventions have been implemented by the codecs.


This is about European trolls, which aren't being discussed enough in the media (not in English anyway). IAM is advertising a blackmail expert and a patent troll, Sisvel. And if one checks the funding sources of IAM, it's ever more clear that it's a front group of trolls.

Jan Ozer, over in "Online Video News", was also doing a puff piece (maybe they don't realise how truly evil this troll is). Here is the corresponding press release. It's about software patents.

If nowadays in Europe patent trolls can write articles and present talks, even keynotes, why not issue press releases too? Thanks to corrupt EPO management, these patent trolls (some from the US!) nowadays get a treatment of a 'celebrity' (EPO is constantly legitimising trolls).

"Luxembourg smells fiscal evasion," Benjamin Henrion remarked on this particular troll. "Sisvel patent troll now attacking Google's "royalty-free" VP9 and AV1," he added, "the patent nightmare continues in the quest for a "free web"..."

This troll was last mentioned yesterday by IAM. "Sisvel is launching a new video compression licensing programme covering patents reading on the VP9 video encoding format and the AV1 open video coding format," it wrote. Hardly a good description of what's happening here. These are software patents being leveraged by a villainous troll in Europe, without having to even face a court.

Days ago we saw this report that said: "Intel has released an open source CPU encoder for the AV1 video format developed by the Alliance of Open Media (AOMedia) consortium. As one of its founding members, Intel has been involved in the development of the royalty-free next-generation format that was released last year."

Meanwhile the patent troll from Europe goes after it with software patents that aren't valid in Europe.

But worry not; according to IAM, there's no troll problem in Europe. IAM denies the underlying facts while flattering the EPO for "quality" of its patents. A few days ago IAM also cheered for US trolls that buy patents in auctions. "We recently released an analysis of US patent sales for the last three months of 2018 using data provided by Allied Security Trust," IAM wrote. "Although the amount of assets transacted significantly dropped from 3,977 to 1,831, due to the absence of large-scale transactions, deal numbers increased 25% compared to the same period in 2017."

So they spin the numbers, turning the halving in number into "increase". Nice spin you got there. Typical IAM.

This patent trolls' lobby, IAM, is also promoting software patents under the guise of "AI" [1, 2] (copied into Lexology) -- a pattern we've noted at the start.

At the end of the day it all boils down to one thing: Quite extrajudicially software patents are being enforced in Europe by the likes of Sisvel and MPEG-LA, who in Germany act as fronts for Philips and Fraunhofer.

The latest post from Florian Müller in Germany shows that Germany is coming to grips with the fact that a lot of patent trolls have come: [via]

As a cross-jurisdictional patent litigation watcher I can tell that injunctive relief is what attracts plaintiffs to Germany more than anything else. That's why they tend to play the lottery: they assert a bunch of patents, most of which tend to be weak, just in hopes of securing an injunction that allows them to settle an entire dispute on their preferred terms. Until the Court of Justice of the EU handed down its Huawei v. ZTE opinion, it was hard to avoid injunctive relief in Germany even over standard-essential patents (SEPs).

This may change, and I'm one of those who hope it will. Last week I attended a really great conference entitled "Enforcing Patents Smoothly--From Automatic Injunctions to Proportionate Remedies" that was organized and hosted by the Friedrich Alexander University of Erlangen-Nuremberg, where academics, practitioners, and a Mannheim judge (Presiding Judge Dr. Peter Tochtermann) discussed this subject. I wish to thank Professor Franz Hofmann for chairing this conference, and the ip2innovate industry body for supporting it. It clearly exceeded my expectations. At that conference I learned about a legislative initiative in Germany that appears to be in its embryonic stages.

Meanwhile I've obtained official confirmation from the Federal Ministry of Justice and Consumer Protection of Germany that an "expert talk" will take place on May 20, 2019, for the stated purpose of preparing a legislative initiative in the area of intellectual property policy. Industyr groups, academics and judges will discuss one of the potential elements of said initiative: a potential reform of the legal framework governing patent injunctions, particularly in connection with SEPs and, more generally, complex products.

All of the presentations at the Erlangen conference were great, and most of them would actually deserve to be discussed in greater detail, which I may do at a different point in time. What I do wish to share here is the impression that those advocating a more eBay-like approach in Germany, which would require some proportionality principle to be enshrined in statutory law, likely have far more political clout than those opposing it. And they have EU law on their side: the IP enforcement directive comes with a proportionality paragraph, just that Germany transposed it into national law only in connection with other types of intellectual property rights than patents.

[...]

Professor Christian Osterrieth, one of the name partners of the Reimann Osterrieth Köhler Haft (ROKH) firm that is now part of Hoyng Rokh Monegier, explained how eye-opening it was for him to see a case in which a single patent covering a secondary aspect of a technology could have had disruptive impact on Germany's highway toll collection system. The way Professor Osterrieth described the problem was reminiscent of Justice Kennedy's famous and influential eBay concurrence.

Professor Hofmann made a more theoretical argument for greater flexibility. Professor Thomas Cotter (University of Minnesota, and author of the Comparative Patent Remedies blog that I've recommended on various occasions) focused on the economics of patent injunctions. Simply put, injunctive relief creates a situation in which the parties will negotiate a price, and a court-determined ongoing royalty would be another, so the key question is which approach results in a more reasonable valuation. It's about avoiding overcompensation as well as undercompensation.


So they merely try to ameliorate things; instead, maybe they should take a hard look at what goes on at the EPO in Munich, having systematically stonewalled and disregarded complaints from EPO staff. ____ * According to Dutch media, a key supporter of SUEPO is also suffering, so it may be part of a broader trend. [via]

The biggest Dutch trade union federation FNV is poised to cut its workforce by almost 20% or 400 full and part-time jobs, the Volkskrant said on Friday.

Membership numbers are declining and this is forcing the union to make cuts totalling €16m a year, the paper said. It bases its claim on the plan to reorganise the union’s operations.


Recent Techrights' Posts

Slopwatch: Brian Fagioli, Google News, and Other LLM Slopfarms
Why does Google News keep promoting these fake articles?
Links 29/10/2025: Amazon Kept "Data Center Water Use Secret", "Abuse of Power" Against Media
Links for the day
Gemini Links 29/10/2025: "My Hardware Specs" and "Goodbye Debian…"
Links for the day
EPO Cocainegate: Feedback and Clarifications
Part III will come out soon
Links 29/10/2025: "US Military Is Destroying the Planet Beyond Imagination" and Boat Strikes Deemed Unlawful
Links for the day
Quality Comes First (Techrights Search)
It's generally working already, but we wish to polish it some more
Techrights Party Countdown
Late next week we'll be holding a party near our home
European Parliament and Council Directive on Privacy is Vanishing
"edited / censored some time more recently"
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Tuesday, October 28, 2025
IRC logs for Tuesday, October 28, 2025
Slopwatch: The March of Slopfarms, From UbuntuPIT to Linux Journal and to Various Fake Sites Still Promoted by Google News
It's so worrying to see what the Web has become
Links 29/10/2025: CISA, Ukraine, and Amazon Problems
Links for the day
[Teaser] The EPO's Spokesperson, a Cocaine User, Fancies Young Women
How's that for "optics" in the EU and Europe's second-largest institution?
How Will António Campinos Respond to the EPO's 'Cocainegate'?
That's the same thing we saw and still see when the press deals with enablers and partners of Jeffrey Epstein
Join Us Now and Share the News - Part IV: There Cannot be Free Software Without Free Press and Free Information
One day, one can hope, more people will recognise that for Software Freedom we need free press and free thinkers
Join Us Now and Share the News - Part III: Principled Stance Is Never Cheap
Protecting the truth and insisting that the general public is made aware of things that really happened isn't cheap
Join Us Now and Share the News - Part II: Because Scarcity of Accurate Information Breeds Collective Ignorance
we too will strive to share information that's aggressively suppressed
Gemini Links 28/10/2025: More New Arrivals at Geminispace, xkcd on "Document Forgery"
Links for the day
Join Us Now and Share the News - Part I: Defence of the Truth
This year we make a very strong, firm statement for truth, even if that means explaining our work to the top media judge in the country
Links 28/10/2025: Meta and Fentanylware (CheeTok) Age-Restricted Down Under, "Britain Needs China’s Money"
Links for the day
Links 28/10/2025: Mass Layoffs at Amazon and Charter to Cut 1,200 Jobs
Links for the day
The Cocaine Patent Office - Part II: The Person Who Planted Paid-for Fake News for the European Patent Office (EPO) is a Cocaine User, Friend of António Campinos, Now on Record as Having Been Arrested
Background: High-level manager at the European Patent Office caught in public with cocaine, arrested
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Monday, October 27, 2025
IRC logs for Monday, October 27, 2025
Google News Drowning in Slop (and Slopfarms That Hijack About Half the Results)
Google News seems to be drowning in this stuff
Gemini Links 28/10/2025: "How to Maximize Your Positive Impact" and ASCII Art and Artist Attribution
Links for the day
PETA and Activism
Being staff or volunteer in PETA isn't easy
Big Blue, Huge Debt
debt will soar again
Links 27/10/2025: Mass Surveillance Sold as "AI", People Reluctant to Lose Physical Media
Links for the day
Parties and Milestones Again
we've begun putting up about 40 balloons
Techrights' 19th Anniversary: Bronze
Time to go back to preparing for this anniversary
Our Latest European Patent Office (EPO) Series Will Last Several Weeks, Will Ask the EPO Management and the European Union (EU) Very Difficult Questions
If nobody loses a job (or jobs) over this, then the EU basically became no better than Colombia or Nicaragua
Slopwatch: LinuxSecurity, UbuntuPIT, Brian Fagioli, and Google News
We focus on stories that are fake or LLM slop that disguises itself as "news" about Linux
Links 27/10/2025: Wikipedia Vandalism, Bruce Perens Opens up on Childhood
Links for the day
This Site Could Not be Done by LLMs Even If It Wanted to (Because It's Not a Parrot of What Other Sites Say)
LLMs have no knowledge or deep understanding
Microsoft is Disloyal Towards Its Most Loyal Employees
Against its most faithful enablers
19 Years, No Censorship
No factual information is ever going to be removed, more so if it is in the public interest
We Are Not a Conventional Site, That's Why They Hate (or Love) Us
Throughout the week this week we'll be focusing on the EPO
Following the Line of Cocaine All the Way to the Top
Even a million denials and spin-doctoring won't distract from the core issue
The Cocaine Patent Office - Part I: António Campinos Brought Corruption and Nepotism to the EPO, Then Came the Cocaine
High-level manager at the European Patent Office (EPO) caught in public with cocaine, the Office has some answering to do
Purchasing/Possessing Computers Isn't the Same as Controlling Computers
Let's strive to put computers back under the control of their users, no matter who purchased these (usually the users)
Gemini Links 27/10/2025: Alhena 5.4.3 and Fixing Bash
Links for the day
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Sunday, October 26, 2025
IRC logs for Sunday, October 26, 2025
Thankfully We've Made Copies of More Interesting Data From statCounter
If statCounter (the Web site or the 'webapp') vanished overnight, we'd still have something left of it
More Silent Layoffs at IBM/Red Hat
when the media counts such layoffs or presents tallies the numbers are very incomplete