THE EPO just can't help breaking the rules. Earlier this week we showed that it was publicly pushing for software patents in Europe. This has become so routine! They just don't care about patent quality or patent scope anymore! Anything goes!
"They just don't care about patent quality or patent scope anymore!"Well, European Patents (EPs) are no longer difficult to get; just ask EPO examiners as some of them explicitly tell us so (under conditions of anonymity). People or companies pay a lot of money (prohibitive costs to small companies or sole inventors) for examination/search that some professionals say is inferior to that offered by national patent offices like Spain's. Why waste money like this and how long will it last? The number of applications (EPs) is already declining and this new press release (from today) sounds like a software patent just got granted by the EPO. It speaks of a "mobile-based transaction authentication system and the cryptographic processes it uses to identify individual mobile devices and secure communications to and from them" (i.e. software-level security).
"....European Patents (EPs) are no longer difficult to get; just ask EPO examiners as some of them explicitly tell us so (under conditions of anonymity)."Why are such patents still being granted? It sounds like the classic type of patent to be passed to trolls for litigation/blackmail against any company that merely uses software, not just companies that develop software.
Earlier today the EPO resumed promotion of both software patents and the UPC (see the cited page about "ICT seminar 2017"). These two things are connected, for reasons we wrote about in past years. The EPO keeps granting patents on software even though that's against the rules and then it says this: "Join us to find out about the differences between US & European practice for ICT patent applications..."
By "ICT" they mean mostly software and here is the part about UPC:
There will also be sessions on "Streamlining patent prosecution at the EPO" and "Latest developments in the Unitary Patent and Unified Patent Court" as well as overviews from both the EPO and IPO on recent developments relevant to the audience.
"The EPO's lobbying activity (influencing the governments) makes as much sense as border control agencies publishing an endorsement of a political party ahead of an election."As noted in our last post, the UPC is stuck and its proponents can only ever pretend that its ratification is inevitable. The EPO seeds some lies about it and then the patent industry uses that as 'proof' that the UPC is coming. We wrote some posts about it (several times since it had come out). Today we found this new example of the echo chamber effect. Camilleri Preziosi's Henri Mizzi, Sharon Xuereb, Terence Cassar and Kristina Azzopardi wrote an article titled "EPO Publishes a Guide on Obtaining, Maintaining and Managing Unitary Patents" (which don't even exist).
One major problem is, the UPC agreement isn't happening and the Unitary Patent as a whole may be dead. EPO management is just lobbying; it forgot the purpose of its existence. The EPO's lobbying activity (influencing the governments) makes as much sense as border control agencies publishing an endorsement of a political party ahead of an election. ⬆