LOOKING at our reference page (or index) for the European Patent Office, we're fast approaching 3,000 posts (about this subject alone). Our writings on this topic have had impact and earlier this week we were contacted by German academia. These matters are being watched closely as there's a legal as well as technical angle to it all. There are also economic aspects and António Campinos, considering his professional background in banking, will no doubt be aware of the financial ramifications. Patent systems cannot be presumed benign just because they grant lots and lots of patents, amassing a bunch of money in the process. The costs associated with these patents are passed outwards. Scholars have long studied these relationships between patents, innovation, and economics. It's not a simple topic.
"For Europe to have its own equivalents of Alice and Mayo the judiciary will need to enjoy independence from the Office, which measures its performance only in terms of money (or "products" to/from "customers")."It is, on the one hand, troubling to see how the EPO embraced patent maximalism. On the other hand, there's also growing opposition to it, even from insiders. This post from yesterday shows how patent maximalists such as Kevin E. Noonan (the lawsuits business) habitually advocate/promote patents on plants, life, genes/genetics. They fail to see just how irrational it is. They treat nature as though it was invented by (wo)man. That's false. It is a colonialist ideology that persists in the 21st century and gets sold to the public using propaganda terms (euphemisms like "intellectual property rights" where every single word is a deliberate lie).
Patent maximalism may be waning, but only after decades of unstoppable gains. It was a bubble all along. We take note of the fact that many blogs about patents have become inactive or barely active. It's very easy to demonstrate this statistically, albeit it would require some amount of work (like counting blog items in one's RSS reader). Things have gotten so bad for the maximalists that some have had to change jobs. Blowhards like Gene Queen changed careers after a couple of decades only to be entertained, as per this new press release from Anaqua, in some events where keynotes involve Watchtroll and EPO ("Thomas Bereuter, Programme Area Manager of Innovation Support at the European Patent Academy, European Patent Office (EPO)"). Watchtroll, the Web site, is becoming more and more like a ghost town, with the large majority of the posts receiving no comments (there are no sign-up barriers), the overall number of posts declining, and the editor stepping down/aside. It's not difficult to see the writings on the wall. We dare predict that the next major turnaround will be the demise of software patents in Europe as well as patents on life -- a couple of subjects we shall cover next (in separate posts). For Europe to have its own equivalents of Alice and Mayo the judiciary will need to enjoy independence from the Office, which measures its performance only in terms of money (or "products" to/from "customers"). ⬆