Reference: Cover-up

Summary: It has gotten extremely difficult to hold the conspirators accountable for turning Europe's patent office into a 'printing machine' of the litigation industry and amassing vast amounts of money (to be passed to private, for-profit companies)

ANOTHER DAY passes and the European Patent Office (EPO) is, as usual, breaking the law. It's also intentionally harming Europe while deflecting. There were no less than two "SME"-themed tweets from the EPO yesterday, citing its own 'sponsored' (bribed-for) 'studies'...

Distracting from EPO leaks again? How much damage does the EPO wish to cause Europe?

Not to worry -- they're cooking the books and manufacturing some more false claims by bribing scholars for 'studies' on so-called 'IP'. For over 3 weeks they're been repeating these lies every single day. They try to make these lies seem "scientific..."

Ménière is a pseudo-scientist of Battistelli (and now António Campinos). He's nowadays pushing for patent maximalism using the pseudoscience they call "economics" along with buzzwords such as "4IR". Yesterday the EPO's Twitter account helped spread this pseudoscience by saying: "Innovation in #AdditiveManufacturing is growing exponentially. Our Chief Economist Yann Ménière presented this data at our recent conference in The Hague, where we also fostered internal knowledge exchange & harmonised best practices."

They added "#3Dprinting #patenting" as if to say it's desirable. Ask anyone who's in 3-D printing just to what extent patents in that domain suspended innovation and how long for (decades!) because it's a very well known case against patent maximalism/maximalists.

We've also just seen in this very dodgy new page and site (Golden Casino News) a statement about "3D-based damage marking technology":

The European Patent Office, EPO, has taken the decision to allow another European patent for Episurf Medical (NASDAQ: EPIS B). The decision was taken at an oral proceeding at the EPO in Munich , Germany. The patent, entitled “System and method for creating a decision support material indicating damage to an anatomical joint” covers Episurf Medical’s 3D-based damage marking technology which constitutes a central part of the Episealer€® implant system as well as the Epioscopy€® joint visualisation system.

Certainly sounds like a software patent and an area I worked in (my Ph.D. thesis is about that).

It's not hard to see that the EPO does exactly the opposite of advancing science in Europe. All it strives to achieve is more litigation in Europe. The EPO's stance on the EPO-connected UPC is an eternal reminder of that.

The UPC is thankfully dead and 'unitary' patents are actually just fiction/fantasy. The EPO had spoken about them for years until a couple of years ago. It stopped mentioning that. Team UPC has been silent for months; it no longer even mentions Milan (as London substitute), which has just been brought up by Hogan Lovells' Riccardo Fruscalzo in relation to other patent matters in Lexology.

IP Kat hasn't mentioned the UPC since summer and the only words/allusions there regarding EPO scandals are in comments. Here's one new comment from MaxDrei, who replies to a comment we quoted here earlier in the week:

As to Alex Frost's "in no way of their own making" I wonder, whether that reminds anybody else but me of a case before Robin Jacob, in which the dispute with the Patent Office was about whether a document had indeed been filed at the Patent Office. Robin Jacob concluded that the representative was the author of Applicant's misfortune, pointing out that there was a good reason why the Patent Office issues receipts for docs filed and if the rep cannot be bothered to check them, any resulting misfortune is his own fault.

Can anybody recall the case reference?

A "patent attorney" said, "I think the EPO has lost sight of the fact it needs to be more 'user-friendly' and it is becoming a place where mistakes have a disproportionate effect." To quote the entire comment (with a later one appended):

Now that we have the EPO post grant limitation proceedings, I really don't know why we cannot have post-grant correction for any error. The EPO has the mechanisms to do this easily, and it should try to be more helpful to applicants/patentees

[...] I think the EPO has lost sight of the fact it needs to be more 'user-friendly' and it is becoming a place where mistakes have a disproportionate effect. We patent attorneys should not need to be professors or be capable of seeing a small error in 400 pages of description to do our routine job. Can we really say that third parties have been substantially disadvantaged by a patent proprietor reinserting pages into a specification which were clearly missing? It should be far simpler to correct errors, and should not need references to 3 or 4 TBA decisions. In particular the system should not be punitive in any way, which it seems to be whenever it says it was up to the applicant to get it right. As I say the EPO has forgotten it is providing a public service, and should be more user-friendly to its users

Kant wrote:

Re substance or composition Since A53(c) refers to "surgery or therapy", it follows that a substance or composition for use in such a method is not required to have a therapeutic effect if used in a method of surgery. The therapeutic effect case law arose under EPC1977 with regard to Swiss Type claims which related to pharmaceutical preparations. Accordingly, the previous case law should not be used to limit the meaning of the EPC after a change in the law.

Notice how they all keep citing the EPC as if the EPC still matters; the EPO violates the EPC every day and then covers that up. Thankfully the examiners are close to another revolt. They're well aware of what's happening and they don't like it. ⬆