THE EPO is out of control. It's granting patents like water and examiners are made to feel like jelly. They joined the Office to challenge themselves (and patent applications) intellectually, not to be mindless clerks with steep quotas/targets. It's the difference between peer-reviewing scholarly papers (unique) and marking school exams. One teaches you a lot, the latter is mostly repetitive and robotic.
"How many people can afford 9 years of legal bills?"In the video about I'm not going into the depths of this latest high-profile patent to be revoked/nullified (Konstanze Richter wrote about the EPO Boards of Appeal doing so, but it's akin to another Juve marketing piece for law firms); instead I show this latest utter nonsense (warning: epo.org link) from António Campinos, who just like Benoît Battistelli fills up the "news" section with self-promotional trash, not news. They're just floating a whole bunch of nonsense about quality and processes. The "news" section of epo.org became a stream of lies (JUVE reprints those verbatim); ask examiners what they think of it and they'll gladly say that themselves! Many stakeholders feel the same way, astonished to see what the Office says about e-EQE blunders and kangaroo courts. SACEPO is another one of those subservient and propagandistic entities akin to think tanks, hardly a substitute/surrogate to oversight, audit, scrutiny, outside assessment and so on. Also check the composition of SACEPO and other such "Working Parties"; they're industry-tied or industry-led. Large companies.
The above were both published this morning, minutes or about an hour apart. There's nothing unusual about that. In fact, we've been getting accustomed to seeing all sorts of stories like that. We see them all the time, but they've recently been relegated to Daily Links. Many are in disciplines we don't grasp too well, unlike software patents. Notice the part where the EPO is pushing proprietary Microsoft Office formats (DOCX) while internally outsourcing all the key operations to Microsoft. It's illegal.
The cost of the EPO's corruption/incompetence is huge. As pointed out in the video above, you need to fight for almost a decade over one single patent. To quote:
The US aerospace company Boeing and its European competitor Airbus have been fighting at the EPO for almost nine years. The disputed Boeing patent EP 1 798 872 protects a method for handling aircraft communications.