Summary: The patent extravaganza in Europe harms small businesses the most (they complain about it), but administrative staff at patent offices only cares about the views of prolific applicants rather than the interests of citizens in respective countries

THE Battistelli/Campinos-run EPO is a blatant, shameless promoter of software patents in Europe, as we last noted earlier today. Similarly, the new USPTO Director is hostile towards 35 U.S.C. ۤ 101 because he has long been an advocate of software patents. He made money from litigation, just like Michael Borella who earlier today promoted the rigged 'panels' that merely discredited the US Senate. What makes these people so sure that 'dissing' courts/judges is a good idea? It only aggravates them.

"They're an illusion of value (like Ponzi schemes) or simply fake 'assets' that are just a piece of paper courts would spit at."Earlier today Ben Wodecki (IPPro Magazine) wrote about "HEY HI!" (AI) patents -- whatever they actually are; they're usually just bogus, abstract patents. They're an illusion of value (like Ponzi schemes) or simply fake 'assets' that are just a piece of paper courts would spit at.

It certainly seems like UK-IPO is trying to attract dubious applications; it wants patent applications of low quality and drops a big number (€£630 billion) because of "AI patents", which Wodecki was happy to pass on as though it was factual. To quote:

The number of UK patents in artificial intelligence (AI) has grown exponentially and is expected to add €£630 billion to the UK’s economy by 2035, according to a report from the UK Intellectual Property Office (UKIPO). The report, which gives an overview of AI patents and patenting by the UK AI sector, showed that the UK’s patent activity related to AI technologies has more than doubled in the last decade.

However, according to UKIPO figures, around 88 percent of AI-related patents first filed in the UK are also protected elsewhere.

The US still dominates globally in the number of AI-related patents, with double the number of patents compared to the UK. The UK sits in a respectable fourth place, behind two multinational offices, the European Patent Office (EPO) and the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO).

What good are these patents though? Here's another way to put it; as a reminder, the UK Supreme Court is no friend of patent extremists [1, 2]. It throws out patents like these and the higher the court is, the more likely it is to do so because at the higher levels corruption and mischief are harder to get away with; so the law is adhered to/respected more often, ratio-wise. Also among the contributing factors: more eyes (scrutiny) due to importance by precedent.

"It certainly seems like UK-IPO is trying to attract dubious applications..."As it turns out, or as patent maximalists put it today, UK Supreme Court judge Lord Justice David Kitchin slaps down this whole "HEY HI!" (AI) hype that's used to justify bogus patents in places that are run by clueless and greedy bureaucrats (like at the EPO). To quote the outline:

UK Supreme Court judge Lord Justice David Kitchin says he is not convinced AI-created works warrant the same IP protection as human creations

The EPO does not seem to care what European judges are saying; instead, the EPO hopes to just replace them all with judges more closely/directly controlled by the EPO. "French ratification of the UPC was pushed through the Senate by rapporteur M. Ronan Le Gleut, who was examiner at the EPO," Benjamin Henrion noted some time ago (we wrote about him before) and another EPO alumnus, Christian Archambeau, moved from the EPO to EUIPO, where both institutions are still 'googlebombing' the term "SMEs". They just try to distract from the harm they cause to these, expediting work that concerns large foreign companies; the UPC would of course cause further harm to SMEs. Over the past month or so, several times per week in fact, the EPO and EUIPO have promoted the same bogus 'study', which they paid for (it invalidates the argument of neutrality or motivation being benign). Earlier today the EPO once again tweeted: "Our joint study with the @EU_IPO shows that the likelihood of experiencing a high-growth period is 17% higher for SMEs that have filed for at east one European IPR."

"The EPO does not seem to care what European judges are saying; instead, the EPO hopes to just replace them all with judges more closely/directly controlled by the EPO."That's based on bad science, just like prior 'studies' they did on SMEs, which are harmed the most. Watch them bragging (warning: epo.org link), even in Twitter this morning, about that stupid "award" of theirs; they reward software patents from foreign giants like Qualcomm and want us to believe that those patents exist for a positive purpose.

"Munich fake injunction [with EP2724461] published," wrote Florian Müller in his blog only a few hours ago, demonstrating that patent quality is a disaster and this results in highly expensive injustice. This is what Qualcomm did:

This is a long-overdue follow-up to a post of two months back on an order by the Oberlandesgericht München (Munich Higher Regional Court) granting a motion by Apple to stay the enforcement of Qualcomm's illegitimate (for multiple reasons) Germany-wide injunction over EP2724461 on a "low-voltage power-efficient envelope tracker"--a patent that an opposition panel of the European Patent Office revoked last month because it shouldn't have been granted in the first place, not even in a narrower form (Qualcomm can and likely will appeal that decision). And Judge Lucy H. Koh's landmark FTC v. Qualcomm antitrust ruling came down that same week.

Of all the cases I've watched since I started this blog nearly a decade ago, what went wrong in this Munich case makes it the worst non-standard-essential patent case by a wide margin, just like the district court's Oracle v. Google rulings were the worst in any software copyright case and the Mannheim Regional Court, in 2012, set a negative example for how to handle a standard-essential patent (SEP) case when it totally failed to recognize Motorola Mobility's blatant antitrust violation by seeking to enforce SEPs after initially making bad-faith out-of-this-world royalty demands (a royalty on computers that was effectively more than a 100% royalty rate since Microsoft would have had to pay Motorola more than it typically earned per copy of Windows sold to an OEM). Apart from that, I've certainly seen--and keep seeing--very bad stuff coming out of the Eastern District of Texas on various occasions, but those weren't cases I followed closely.

The regional government of the state of Bavaria published the December 2018 fake injunction ruling, but I still haven't been able to find a public redacted version of the appeals court's order that tears the fake injunction into pieces, so I'm going to publish it here and now (this post continues below the document):

It's not hard to see that an SME would not be able to endure because it's just too expensive. Yet patent extremists from CIPA and Team UPC not only promote the UPC but also software patents. IP Kat (Jonathan Pratt) has just advertised an event in which patent extremists from CIPA promote patents on life and nature. To quote:

CIPA’s annual Life Science Conference is taking place on 11 and 12 November 2019 in Brighton. The conference is an educational and networking event for patent and IP professionals active in the pharma, medical technology and biotechnology sectors. There will be a pre-dinner speech by Lord Kitchin. More information can be found here.

"Intellectual Property Magazine is recruiting a Reporter in its Business Intelligence division," he adds. Some of their writers left. We've noticed. In fact, staff turnover in these think tanks (disguised as "news") seems very high. Many quit and just vanish without notice. Same in MIP and IAM. The patent maximalists in general experience calamity these days.

"One has to wonder if they even care about science at all. They don't."Just over an hour ago IP Kat (Cecilia Sbrolli) wrote some more fluff about "Fourth Industrial Revolution" -- a vague marketing term that the EPO likes to use when it talks about software patents (knowing it cannot use the term "software patents"). To quote the introduction: "A few weeks ago this Kat was pleased to participate in the event "Institutions And Regulation For The Fourth Industrial Revolution" jointly organised by the Liège Innovation and Innovation Institute (LCII), Hoover IP2 (Stanford University), and the Center for Intellectual Property of the University of Gothenburg."

Yeah, so-called 'Intellectual Property' [sic]. One has to wonder if they even care about science at all. They don't. ⬆