Bonum Certa Men Certa

Supreme Court of the UK, Which Habitually Throws Out European Patents, May Overturn Troublesome Unwired Planet v Huawei Decision

Bad news for patent trolls and their legal representatives (the likes of Bristows/Team UPC)

A jungle
"But they're GREEN monopolies! They're GREEN!!!"



Summary: A lot of European Patents are facing growing scrutiny from courts (Team UPC, including Bristows, publicly complains about it this month) and "greenwashing" of the Office won't be enough to paint/frame these patents as "ethical"

HAVING just covered the German Federal patent court's take on SPCs, weakening/limiting the breadth of some European Patents, let's also consider the fact that Mayo may cause the USPTO to reject similar patents in the US (patents on food). Today's EPO, under the leadership of António Campinos, is arguably more lenient than the USPTO. Some people from Team UPC have said that software patents are now easier to get in Europe than in the United States (where such patents originally came from, due to the Federal Circuit's decision/stance about half a century back). Owing to 35 U.S.C. €§ 101/Alice (US Supreme Court), software patents are pretty much worthless in American courts nowadays; the same goes for patents on nature, owing for the most part to Mayo (there's also Myriad). Weeks ago we saw the UK Supreme Court (highest British court) knocking down a European Patent on natural compounds (where the supposed innovation was a recipe).



Are we indeed seeing the Alpine avalanche of European Patents? Is it the beginning of the collapse? The rumbling of snow? Sooner or later it will come down and it will cover everything in its path.

Yesterday we caught this important new blog post from Florian, who we knew back then would be followed by a lot of 'press' coverage (authored and published by law firms, not actual journalists, i.e. the usual). It's about the most infamous patent troll of Ericsson, whose legal wars in London posed a great threat to British software companies. The name of this troll keeps changing -- pretty normal practice among trolls looking to dodge the negative past publicity. It's currently known as "Unwired Planet" and we included articles about this latest development in yesterday's (afternoon) daily links alongside this coverage by Rose Hughes for Richard Vary (Bird & Bird, Team UPC, FRAND zealots). We prefer not to link to it (published 35 minutes after Florian's blog post) because that tends to promote lies of the FRAND lobby. This blog typically pushes such coverage (on this case and this topic in general) from "AmeriKat" (Bristows), but this time it's their 'sibling' Bird & Bird. Expect Bristows to say much more (and complain) in blogs such as IP Kat and Kluwer Patent Blog in the coming days. To quote Bird & Bird: "As discussed on IPKat here, the Court of Appeal decisions in Unwired Planet and Conversant were significant. The Court found that the English courts have jurisdiction in considering and determining the terms of a global FRAND licence. The courts could not force Huawei to enter into a global licence. However, the court could prevent Huawei from using the technology to which the SEPs relate, unless they entered into a global licence."

It would not at all surprise us if these patent trolls are Bird & Bird clients (without disclosure), i.e. they represent these parasitic, villainous trolls. The case in question relates to a patent troll of Microsoft, albeit indirectly. This troll is currently called "Conversant" (formerly MOSAID) and maybe it will rename again in the future. Their names are a dime a dozen and they don't have any real operations. They don't need a brand; they sell nothing.

The above case may serve to overturn a dangerous decision that threatens Free/libre software among many other things (including fair competition). When shifting to courts outside the UK, as they sometimes do, trolls want decisions that are more favourable to them (e.g. in Eastern Texas and its German equivalents). Thankfully, the UPC(A) seems to be permanently dead. More dead than ever. We're past Easter now and there's no sign of progress. Seeing the judges' persistent 'exile' in Haar, the FCC in Germany won't be impressed. The EPO cannot be trusted with anything. "The Convention watchdog" left this comment some days ago and hours ago it was belatedly (almost a week late) approved. It says:

As to geography:

To make it quite clear, the Landkreis München is not a broader area than the City of Munich but a different area. It comprises municipalities outside Munich but not Munich itself.

In this respect, the referring decision addresses an interesting point at Reasons, pt. 3.3. The Headquarters Agreement between the European Patent Organisation and Germany, concluded implementing Art. 25 of the Protocol on Privileges and Immunities, contains in its Articles 11 and 12 provisions on the premises of the Organisation in Munich and of the Berlin sub-office. The Berlin sub-office has its legal basis in Section I, Article 3 a) of the Protocol on Centralisation which is part of the Convention pursuant to Art. 164 (1) EPC. The case of Rijswijk is governed by the corresponding Agreement with the Netherlands, defining in its Article 1: "branch" means the branch of the European Patent Office at The Hague (Rijswijk), in order to make clear that the existing premises of the IIB are covered by the Agreement and the Protocol on Privileges and Immunities. In any case this shows that the legal situation for Berlin and Rijswijk is different from the situation for Haar. The competence in Article 7 EPC to create further sub-offices does not cover sub-offices for the departments of the EPO entrusted with procedural functions under the Convention.


Another person then wrote: "Why does the possible interpretation of "Munich" as "Landkreis München" have to be *exclusive* of the City of Munich? Would it not also be in keeping with the Vienna Convention to interpret "Munich" in Art. 6 EPC as meaning "a location within either of the City of Munich and Landkreis München"?"

Imagine what would happen if all patent cases were decided by the same system that kicked out these judges to Haar, probably in direct violation of the EPC. As an act of retaliation (or scare tactics) from Office management...

Today's EPO lacks legitimacy and Campinos has done absolutely nothing to change that. It's like "greenwashing" of the Office, a man with a smile who stabs you as soon as you turn around.

Speaking of greenwash, there's this new article about the EPO's PATSTAT. It's about patent monopolies on "sustainable innovation", i.e. things you are not allowed to do in order to combat climate issues. Here they go again with epic greenwash:

Green Tech DB uses patents in order to provide a database that offers a comprehensive overview of the developments of Green Technologies worldwide.

Researches use the PATSTAT 2016a database as their patent source; which is produced by the European Patent Office (EPO). “The main advantage of using PATSTAT, a database produced by the European Patent Office, is to have information about patent applications that covers more than 80 different countries. As a patent is a legal object, information available in different patent databases is similar, what differs is the coverage across time and countries, and PATSTAT has one of the best coverage.”


The EPO's database of patents used to be a source of envy, but nowadays it is polluted by loads of bogus patents which would cost a fortune to invalidate.

Recent Techrights' Posts

Is BlueMail a Client of ZDNet Now?
Let's examine what BlueMail does to promote itself
OpenBSD Says That Even on Linux, Wayland Still Has a Number of Rough Edges (But IBM Wants to Make X Extinct)
IBM tries to impose unready software on users
 
Links 29/11/2023: VMware Layoffs and Too Many Microsofters Going Inside Google
Links for the day
Just What LINUX.COM Needed After Over a Month of Inactivity: SPAM SPAM SPAM (Linux Brand as a Spamfarm)
It's not even about Linux
Microsoft “Discriminated Based on Sexuality”
Relevant, as they love lecturing us on "diversity" and "inclusion"...
IRC Proceedings: Tuesday, November 28, 2023
IRC logs for Tuesday, November 28, 2023
Media Cannot Tell the Difference Between Microsoft and Iran
a platform with back doors
Links 28/11/2023: New Zealand's Big Tobacco Pivot and Google Mass-Deleting Accounts
Links for the day
Justice is Still the Main Goal
The skulduggery seems to implicate not only Microsoft
[Teaser] Next Week's Part in the Series About Anti-Free Software Militants
an effort to 'cancel' us and spy on us
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news
Permacomputing
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License
Professor Eben Moglen on How Social Control Media Metabolises Humans and Constraints Freedom of Thought
Nothing of value would be lost if all these data-harvesting giants (profiling people) vanished overnight
IRC Proceedings: Monday, November 27, 2023
IRC logs for Monday, November 27, 2023
When Microsoft Blocks Your Access to Free Software
"Linux is a cancer that attaches itself in an intellectual property sense to everything it touches." [Chicago Sun-Times]
Techrights Statement on 'Cancel Culture' Going Out of Control
relates to a discussion we had in IRC last night
Stuff People Write About Linux
revisionist pieces
Links 28/11/2023: Rosy Crow 1.4.3 and Google Drive Data Loss
Links for the day
Links 27/11/2023: Australian Wants Tech Companies Under Grip
Links for the day
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news
Links 27/11/2023: Underwater Data Centres and Gemini, BSD Style!
Links for the day
[Meme] Leaning Towards the Big Corporate CoC
Or leaning to "the green" (money)
Software Freedom Conservancy Inc in 2022: Almost Half a Million Bucks for Three People Who Attack Richard Stallman and Defame Linus Torvalds
Follow the money
[Meme] Identity Theft and Forgery
Coming soon...
Microsoft Has Less Than 1,000 Mail (MX) Servers Left, It's Virtually Dead in That Area (0.19% of the Market)
Exim at 254,000 servers, Postfix at 150,774, Microsoft down to 824
The Web is Dying, Sites Must Evolve or Die Too
Nowadays when things become "Web-based" it sometimes means more hostile and less open than before
Still Growing, Still Getting Faster
Articles got considerably longer too (on average)
In India, the One Percent is Microsoft and Mozilla
India is where a lot of software innovations and development happen, so this kind of matters a lot
Feeding False Information Using Sockpuppet Accounts and Imposters
online militants try every trick in the book, even illegal stuff
What News Industry???
Marketing, spam, and chatbots
IRC Proceedings: Sunday, November 26, 2023
IRC logs for Sunday, November 26, 2023
The Software Freedom Law Center's Eben Moglen Explains That We Already Had Free Software Almost Everywhere Before (Half a Century Ago)
how code was shared in the 1970s and 80s