Battistelli and the EPO are running out of time (and applications)

Summary: The declining quality of services at the EPO -- a decline which is being noticed and likely contributes to the decline in the number of patent applications -- is something which Battistelli covers up by bragging about the very symptom of declining patent quality (and thus reduced certainty)

AT THE EPO, according to leaks, patents are granted faster and with less examination. It's atrocious. Speed and quality are very different things, but according to an anonymous insider, the latest EPO lie was conflating those two things.

"Speedy grants don't offer legal certainty but the very opposite."Yesterday, Benoît Battistelli bolstered this lie in his blog (warning: epo.org, so it can be used to harvest IP addresses of visitors). The graphs shown by the Liar in Chief merely serve to confirm that the Office works in a rush, granting patents irrespective of quality (as the number of examiners did not grow). "The EPO therefore offers legal certainty," Benoît Battistelli concluded. Is he really that foolish? One can tell based on his career path, which involved no science at all and nothing regarding "IP" until his mid fifties.

Speedy grants don't offer legal certainty but the very opposite. If the EPO grants bogus patents that courts will reject upon closer scrutiny, certainty around patents is lowered and those who benefit most are patent trolls (litigation tourists) which go after small businesses as these aren't able to afford legal defense. What a disaster! Look at what's already happening in Germany...

"Why should the users of system pay for a service which is not any longer delivered by the EPO?"

That was the question posted in a comment yesterday. Here it is in full:

Why should the users of system pay for a service which is not any longer delivered by the EPO? The fees are high enough, and it is €´clear that there are gripes about the falling quality.

There is one way to draw the attention of the management, and it is for free: file a complaint.

Be careful, in such a situation it is the examiner which will be the primary target.

Do you really want this?

Inquire as to what happened to the examining division which granted the building site wagon with a window to be used as hair dresser saloon.

Incidentally, yesterday an article was published by a legal firm that said "Abbvie repeatedly withdrew their patents when they were about to be decided upon." It's about the EPO too. Here is the relevant bunch of paragraphs:

Fujifilm and Abbvie had entered into lengthy EPO and UK validity proceedings where Abbvie repeatedly withdrew their patents when they were about to be decided upon. Ultimately, Abbvie tried to avoid the grant of a declaration in this UK case by abandoning their UK designations of patents and undertook that they would not seek relief in the UK.

The High Court found that in light of the prior art adduced by Fujifilm, the skilled team would have had a high expectation that the dosage regimen would be efficacious in the treatment of rheumatoid arthritis, thereby holding that the proposed administration of Fujifilm’s products was obvious at the relevant priority date of the patent application.

Fujifilm sought an Arrow declaration arguing that the purpose of Abbvie abandoning the patents was to avoid adjudication of its patentability by the UK court and EPO whilst seeking to ensure that the subject matter of the alleged invention was maintained by a further divisional application. Fujifilm said that it would be many years before the EPO would be in a position to adjudicate on the patentability of the divisional in question, and that the granting of the Arrow declaration would serve a useful purpose, by achieving commercial certainty in respect of Fujifilm’s product by the date of its intended launch in the autumn of 2018.

It looks as though Battistelli has 'imported' the worst elements of the USPTO into Europe. Patent trolls are already taking advantage of this, as we have been showing for a number of months (the raw numbers speak for themselves). UPC would only further exacerbate this. ⬆