Video download link | md5sum 626e5d157b9303c3eacb5b3f87c31f40 EPO Not Worth It Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works 4.0



Summary: The ludicrous state of the EPO is demonstrated by yesterday's puff piece about "four million" (merely requests for monopoly in Europe; most come from outside Europe) and L'Oréal, which claims to have "invented" something that was already done in the 1990s if not the 1980s

THE EPO's tyranny has taken its toll. The quality of patents being granted -- as per "targets" -- is really bad, many of these are invalid software patents, and António Campinos -- clueless in almost every domain -- name-drops buzzwords, just like his predecessor, friend, and appointer Benoît Battistelli. Campinos described himself as a "nomad" this year; in a sense he's correct, having leaped from banking to trademarks and even to patents, despite a total lack of experience. Like Battistelli, he's a jack of no trades and master of nothing. He is a successful imposter.

"Not only does the EPO boast and brag about attracting a pile of rubbish; it also rubberstamps a lot of this rubbish."Europe will pay the cost for this nepotism and kakistocracy. In the video above I explain the latest spin or twist on software patents. I also explain what that means to prices of products, having just noticed this L'Oréal puff piece (warning: epo.org link). Very simple face recognition -- or even crude analysis of tones -- gets spun as "Hey Hi" (AI) and in turn the meaningless junk, "4IR", citing the pseudoscience called "economics". This is what a press release looks like when complete fools with no background in science write it, celebrating numbers rather than actual science or something truly meaningful.

Today, the European Publication Server reached a new milestone as the EPO published EP 4 000 000. The application from L'Oréal, one of the top ten French applicants in the 2021 Patent Index, concerns an image recognition method in which artificial intelligence (AI) is trained to recognise skin tone, helping customers match their skin tone to cosmetic products.

EP 4 000 000 is just one of a growing number of applications involving fourth industrial revolution (4IR) technologies, a trend observed in several EPO Chief Economist Unit studies. Over the past decade, 4IR innovation such as AI has also spread into domains that are not traditionally regarded as digital, for example, the cosmetics sector.

So now the EPO wants to give software patent to the "cosmetics sector"; aside from the fact that there's ample prior art, this is in effect mathematics or the branch of statistics. But this one gets slanted as "cosmetics", so we're meant to think it's innovative and unprecedented, just like hundreds of thousands of US patents covering something "in a car" or "over the Internet" or "using a phone".

What L'Oréal claims to have 'innovated' has lots of prior art, going back to the time I was a kid. Back then computational resources were more limited and colour depth was lower, often requiring alternative (highly specialised) output devices if not printing (plotting/blending). Not only does the EPO boast and brag about attracting a pile of rubbish; it also rubberstamps a lot of this rubbish. ⬆