01.22.19
Software Patents Are a Dying Breed, So Marks & Clerk and Other Legal Monoliths Promote the EPO’s Buzzwords (Loopholes)
Anything to promote bunk/junk patents
Summary: Patents that courts would almost certainly reject (and invalidate) are routinely promoted as “AI”, “SDV” and similar acronyms and buzzwords, either misleading or intentionally misplaced (nowadays “AI” is often just a synonym for “machine” or “algorithm”)
THE atmosphere of buzzwords worries us. Everywhere one looks in the media, especially technology media, it’s all buzzwords. Maybe that’s because real journalism is dying and reporters get replaced by the marketing/PR industry and by extension law firms looking to market their services in the respective domains. Readers who are technical quite likely know what those buzzwords are and some of these were covered here before.
“This patent litigation giant, Marks & Clerk, is helping the EPO promote software patents on computer vision (my area)…”Here in Techrights we no longer keep track of all the software patents tweets (they don’t say “software patents” explicitly but instead use buzzwords) that have been far more abundant and frequent since António Campinos took over as President. Yesterday we saw this new article from Marks & Clerk’s Philip Cupitt (the patent maximalists if not extremists*). Weeks ago we explained how the European Patent Office’s (EPO) corruption — and avoidance of the law in general — nowadays helps the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) similarly dismiss the courts/caselaw, proceeding to grant software patents that aren’t legally solid (courts would almost certainly can these).
Then, also as recently as yesterday, we saw another Marks & Clerk article, this one with the “self-driving vehicle (SDV)” buzzword that the EPO has been promoting.
This patent litigation giant, Marks & Clerk, is helping the EPO promote software patents on computer vision (my area), never mind if that’s in clear defiance of the EPC, violating the fundamentals of patent scope; buzzwords to bypass the law basically…
With investment announcements coming thick and fast, and testing taking place on ever more roads, might 2019 be the year of the self-driving vehicle (SDV)?
A recent statistical release from the European Patent Office (EPO) might suggest so, or at the very least suggest that momentum is building in this important sector. In 2017, the last year in which figures are available, the EPO saw nearly 4000 patent applications related to self-driving vehicles – up from 922 applications in 2011.
This is a staggering 330% increase in just 6 years! To put it into context, filing in this area has grown more than 20 times as fast as patent applications generally at the EPO.
They are just reclassifying patents. We recently saw a similar article in the US — one in which they basically classified many patents on algorithms as “AI”, then crafted headlines claiming that in recent years there were hundreds of thousands of patents on “AI”; the EPO and the USPTO both use this trick — a subject covered here several times towards the end of last year. █
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* Among the articles we previously wrote about Marks & Clerk (loud proponents of patent maximalism in Europe, including the UPC):
- Marks & Clerk is Still Pushing Patent Maximalism Agenda in Europe and Britain, Including UPC/UPCA/Unitary Patent (UP)
- Marks & Clerk Blames Battistelli’s Victims, the Boards of Appeal, Whose Job Guarded Patent Quality
- UPC Puff Piece in the Scottish Media is Just an Advertisement by Marks & Clerk
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