01.07.16

Patent Lawyers Say It “Remains to be Seen How the EPO Will Limit the Number of PACE Requests an Applicant Can Make”

Posted in Europe, Patents at 4:20 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

The right way is the slow way, which is what European SMEs are getting at the moment

Roadworks

Summary: Patent lawyers from Barker Brettell LLP inadvertently reveal that even those who are traditionally close to the EPO can see the obvious problems with PACE (pacing up patent applications’ processing for large corporations, as if the fast lane wouldn’t get clogged up if everyone subscribed/registered for it)

THE EPO‘s PACE programme is a sham because it currently favours only large corporations, most of them not even European corporations. This shatters the myths (of the EPO's dedicated team of myth makers) and clearly interferes with all the PR that the EPO spreads in Twitter, at its own Web site, and various news avenues where the EPO is painted as Europe’s friend and the protector of vulnerable inventors.

“The whole discriminatory régime favours those submitting in bulk, hence it’s inherently beneficial to large corporations.”“The EPO recently published a notification regarding changes to and clarifications of the PACE procedure coming into force this month (January 2016),” wrote Barker Brettell LLP (patent lawyers whose Web site makes their focus rather apparent even in the homepage). They posted some remarks in lawyers’ media about the hogwash that we wrote about in English and later in Spanish (just published the Spanish translation, literally a few minutes ago). The lawyers say that the EPO’s “changes will, in particular, have an impact on applicants who file in volume and who currently request PACE on all applications. It remains to be seen how the EPO will limit the number of PACE requests an applicant can make.”

Well, this isn’t intended to actually work. The whole discriminatory régime favours those submitting in bulk, hence it’s inherently beneficial to large corporations. Later this month we shall share in public more stories from European SMEs who have increasingly been made aware of (and thus complained about) EPO discrimination against those who are small and powerless. █

“The power of accurate observation is commonly called cynicism by those who have not got it.”

–George Bernard Shaw

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