10.28.15
Secret Deals at the EPO Discredit Europe and Need to Stop Immediately
Summary: What the Sepp Blatter scandals serve to remind us about the practices of the EPO and their negative effect on Europe’s reputation
AMID the EPO scandals, Blatterstelli — as Florian Müller calls him — is compared to famous criminals on television. Now that Sepp Blatter admits his misconduct [1,2], the comparison returns to mind. Basically, Blatter secretly favoured Russia in the same way that Blatterstelli’s EPO had a secret special relationship with Microsoft, so Microsoft's patent applications were treated with priority. The EPO made lame excuses for this.
“Microsoft is a lobbyist for software patents and the EPO has a special relationship with the company, so how much longer can patent examiners do their job properly?”This new article about patents in the UK serves to remind us that patents are really being granted for corporate domination (or the so-called 1%) because “any invention made by such employees in the course of their duties will belong to the employer” (i.e. the corporation).
This system is increasingly being rigged in favour of all those large corporations (big clients, who pay a lot of money for applications and renewal fees), not independent inventors. Patent examiners don’t like this, but the management, whose supposed ‘success’ is measured in terms that apply to a private business, have lost sight of the very purpose of the patent system. This is why they also strive to expand the scope of litigation (e.g. UPC) and extend the scope of patents.
Someone has kindly made us aware of particular patent applications of interest. Here we have patent examiners and judges (not management) who are skilled enough to tell a Texas opportunist to bugger off, here we have Merck withdrawing a patent application (it wanted cancer-related monopolies), and here we can see that only 5 days ago a software patent from Baxter was officially denied. Companies from the US are trying to patent software at the EPO, SAP is still trying to acquire software patents in Europe (the EPO isn’t denying it, at least not yet), and there are various other attempts to patent software in the EPO. If the UPC was to successfully be shoved down everyone’s throat, these would probably be deemed patent-eligible. Microsoft is a lobbyist for software patents and the EPO has a special relationship with the company, so how much longer can patent examiners do their job properly? Institutional corruption needs to end; the sooner, the better. █
News just in:
-
Sepp Blatter: We decided to have 2018 in Russia before there was even a vote
-
Sepp Blatter admits FIFA planned to award Russia the 2018 World Cup before vote even took place
Suspended FIFA president Sepp Blatter has revealed that there was an agreement in place for the 2018 World Cup to be played in Russia before the official vote took place.
Blatter told reporters in Russia that it was always planned for the competition to take place in Russia, while the 2022 competition was scheduled for the USA.
Content is available under CC-BY-SA