Bonum Certa Men Certa

The Lying by Team UPC, Led Again by Kevin Mooney

Video download link



Summary: Team UPC, or specifically Mr. Mooney, lies to the public about the prospects of the UPC; similarly, EPO and EU officials keep bringing up false claims about the UPC, so while the UPC itself has likely died for good the lies have not

ABOUT a day ago (actually a bit less than that) FFII wrote about UPC lies, reiterating the role of the European Commission and the EPO in such lies.



"Basically, Mr. Mooney decided to lobby for his money."There seems to be -- not for the first time one might add -- a complete and total disregard for facts. "FFII has received a testimony that the European Commission has recycled an old Impact Assessment (IA) of the Unified Patent Court (UPC)," it said, "in order to hide the controversial self-financed aspect of the Court, which is why the Court is too expensive for SMEs. Countries are ratifying this dangerous treaty without any real Impact Assessment of the new Court system which will exclude most SMEs with its super high costs. The Impact Assessment was recycled from old treaty project of 2009, the UPLS, with lots of changes in the meantime, similar to what happened recently with the recycling of the Impact Assessment of the Mercosur treaty."

It also noted: "Around early 2012, after some requests to redo the impact assessment by the Scrutiny committee of the British parliament, the representative of the European Commission Margot Frohlinger apparently refused to procure an updated one, according to a testimony we received she did not want to “redo the impact assessment because it would attract critics”. After taking this decision at the European Commission, she left to continue her career at the European Patent Office (EPO), the other self-financed administration that will grant the Unitary Patent. A self-financed patent court is controversial, because the cost is passed on to companies that litigate in front of the court, and no courts in Europe have a self-financed objective (Art36.3 UPCA “the objective of a self-financing Court”), as courts are not companies and should not be driven by financial targets to guarantee the integrity of the justice system. If courts are driven by profit, judges will tend to apply “patent maximalism” just to guarantee their salary."

It says "patent maximalism" -- a term we used a lot about a decade ago (based on "copyright maximalism"). The same observation is made in the comments here, citing Techrights. Basically, Mr. Mooney decided to lobby for his money. He decided to lie again about the UPC and people are reacting. The video above does too.

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