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Summary: The legal basis of today's EPO has been crushed; a lot of this was made possible by countries with barely any stakes in the outcome

THE part about North Macedonia and Albania has just been published. The part covers some of the politics surrounding problematic appointments of EPO delegates. Some have been supporting Benoît Battistelli's regime, some still back António Campinos, and some have done both.

Ultimately, and rather unfortunately, these delegates don't just enable the coup at the Office. They are also complicit in the attack on patent quality and potentially the patent courts. Judging by this latest propaganda from Joff Wild, they don't intend to stop at patents. The monopolies and the litigation firms want to hijack everything in Europe, with several more examples of fake news from Team UPC in our Daily Links. That's where we typically file them with editorial comments to accompany them (with care not to send falsehoods any traffic).

To put it another way, all these representatives from European countries do not actually represent their people at all. They're fronting for special interests. What will be left of Europe's largest patent office if they get their way? Notice one of many comments in response to patent extremists and profiteers (the people at IP Kat who promote the UPC). One of them notes the decline/decrease in patent quality:

The problem is when you see decisions after appeal in opposition before the EPO, around two thirds if not more of the patents are either revoked or maintained in amended form.

And more than often the revocation or amendment is due to documents which were available at the time of the search but were not retrieved during the search (even Art 54(3) prior art from the applicant!).

It would be wise to wait for the result of an opposition when there is an opposition pending at the EPO before deciding on the validity and hence the possible infringement of the German part of an European patent.

When extrapolating the figures from oppositions at the EPO which roughly concern 5% of the granted patents, it seems also advisable to wait the result of the validity examination of the German part of an European patent before deciding on infringement.

I claim that when hit by an infringement action before a German court, it is clear that in most cases the alleged infringer will hit back with a lack of validity. The chances of succeeding on the validity side are quite good when looking at the prior art dug out by opponents.

The EPO claims that its quality has improved since 2010. An analysis of the decisions of the BA in matters of opposition show that this is not, and by far, the case.

There are some other comments of interest in there, as well as 27 comments here. The last comment (hours ago they closed the commenting form) says: "I wonder whether the first party to face an infringement procedure under the UPC could not sue the patent proprietor before a criminal court of for extortion, intimidation and harassment committed by an organised group on the basis of obviously invalid legal claims."

The very legal basis of the patent system, including the EPC, has been thrown out the window. It would be foolish and irresponsible to pretend to ourselves that it's not happening. ⬆