Related: Crazed Battistelli is Trying Plan B to Demolish the Boards of Appeal (Quality Control), Praesidium/Association of Members Strikes Back

Summary: The Unified Patent Court (UPC) push has slowed down if not ground to a halt, but attacks on the Boards of Appeal (BoA), which UPC lobbyists are hoping to replace, appear to carry on under the guise of "consultation" (a concept that Battistelli never seems to have grasped)

THE UPC lobby has been relatively quiet, knowing that Germany put the whole thing on the ice if not in the bin. It may take several years for Team UPC to even know the outcome.

A US-based front group, Center for the Protection of Intellectual Property (CPIP) (not to be mistaken for Center for Intellectual Property Understanding (CIPU)), was mentioned here a couple of years back (amongst other times). It's USPTO-centric and it's now pushing for the UPC, so it's simpler to know it's not a good thing for Europe. It said: "This new paper from our Patent Valuation Symposium by Roya Ghafele et al. is already having an impact in Europe: Using Patent Valuation Methods to Assess Damages in Patent Infringement Cases Under the Unified Patent Court..."

We attempted to find out who sponsored the work, knowing that the EPO already corrupts academia for so-called 'studies' which are really UPC advocacy. The EPO corrupted academia both in the US and in the UK for this. The author, Ghafele, is based in Oxford and works for a private consultancy. From the abstract:

We illustrate how publicly sanctioned IP valuation guidelines prevailing in Europe can be applied to assess damages as foreseen under the provisions of the UPC Agreement. With the help of a hypothetical example, we then evaluate if and to what extent the various ways proposed by European institutions to value IP fit with the provisions of the UPCA. We find that in situations where courts have all the necessary information required to determine damages, the IP valuation methods are a very useful tool in determining damages. It can however be expensive to obtain the necessary data to adequately determine damages.

The author has history with the EPO. From his LinkedIn account:

A changing climate: the IP landscape of clean energy technologies

Oxford Journal of Intellectual Property Law and Practice

2012

This article is a review of a report titled 'Patents and Clean Energy Technologies: Bridging the Gap between Evidence and Policy', published in 2010 by the European Patent Office and the International Centre for Trade and Sustainable Development.

Maybe the apple does not fall far from the tree after all...

Either way, UPC lobbying can be seen elsewhere. "Both the UPC’s Court of Appeal and Registry will be in Luxembourg," Bristows' Brian Cordery wrote a couple of days ago. No, there's no "will" (at best "would") because there's no UPC, but Team UPC does not care about facts and truths. A "unitary" patent system would mean more lawsuits, hence more money for such litigators. They just keep pushing fake predictions to mislead clients and politicians, hoping that they would ratify things hastily, in a great rush, even recklessly.

"They just try to give the public or the "users" the mere impression that they get to decide."What about the EPO itself? Well, yesterday (for the second time in a week) it said: "Our online consultation on the proposed revised Rules of Procedure of the Boards of Appeal will close on 30 April. To take part go to http://bit.ly/2nDHz6V" (that's the direct link, but be aware that it's an epo.org link).

"What makes Battistelli so dangerous is that he very routinely breaks the law and always gets away with it."They just try to give the public or the "users" the mere impression that they get to decide. On Boards of Appeal, however -- like anything else at the EPO -- management doesn't care what anyone but Battistelli thinks. If Battistelli ever saw the UPC (he would never see it, not from within the EPO anyway), there would be no Boards of Appeal left at all. He tries to make them completely obsolete while maintaining not an impression of independence but an perception that he gives a damn about the EPC. What makes Battistelli so dangerous is that he very routinely breaks the law and always gets away with it. ⬆