07.26.16
Posted in Europe, Patents at 4:57 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: The EPO does the usual right-wing thing (exploiting disaster/emergency for domestic crackdowns), but some bemoan the omission of the explosion at Ansbach (also in Germany)
IT was so obvious that the EPO would mention the attack on Monday. We predicted this over the weekend, having seen Battistelli (personally) milking just about every major incident outside of Germany (especially in France and in one case Belgium, then the US).
“Let us now wait and see whether Mr. Battistelli will express heartfelt sympathy to” Munich, one person wrote, alluding specifically “to the people of the host nation of the EPO headquarters.”
“How very Republican of him.”The “news” item (yes, they filed this under news) came a bit later than usual and it came from the EPO this time, for a change (it did not mention Battistelli, perhaps for the first time ever). It said (warning: epo.org links can be tracked by HTTP_REFERER) not so much and later on this was mentioned in Twitter.
One person says that “Battistelli has belatedly expressed his solidarity with the citizens of Munich.”
“But what about the people of Ansbach? Are they second-class citizens? Does he not care about them?”
Another person writes: “It is well known, several people, perhaps more, have been summoned to the president and told, “You are either for me, or you are against me.” It cannot be accepted, that a civil service career should serve a personality cult, and that threats to career and eventually pensions used as the weapons to enforce that cult. The crash when it comes will be big, unfortunately for those of us who are still trying to apply the EPC, which is in fact our only master.”
Battistelli, as we noted before, is trying to unify the staff around a common cause which is war on terror (“You’re either with us, or against us”). How very Republican of him. Watch what happens in Turkey this month. █
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Posted in Deception, Europe, Patents at 4:32 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: Flogging the dead UPC horse at times of great uncertainty (enough to bring the UPC to a standstill)
THE EPO lies not only to journalists but also to staff, as we showed here numerous times before. “The European patent microcosm tries to convince itself that its Unitary Patent castle is not collapsing,” wrote someone who was bullied by the EPO some years ago because he had criticised the UPC (Battistelli's EPO is very legally aggressive towards UPC critics). He links to the latest nonsense from the EPO — nonsense which we rebutted earlier this month.
“What we have here is lobbying and meddling by patent lawyers and other who stand to profit from more litigation in more places.”The Kluwer Patent Blog, one of the biggest pushers of the UPC for a number of years now, still pretends that IP Federation somehow speaks for British businesses, but people should know better. To quote the latest regarding IP Federation: “The IP Federation in the UK is even more adamant. In a position paper published this week, it states that certainty regarding the future should be a prerequisite for further steps by the UK government and parliament: ‘We support the Unitary Patent), and the Unified Patent Court with the UK participating on the current terms, including the location of the branch of the Central Division in London. Without a guarantee of continued UK participation post-Brexit, the UK should not ratify the UPC at present. We consider that ratifying the UPC to bring it into effect and subsequently being forced to leave the system would bring an unacceptable amount of uncertainty to industry across the UK and EU.’”
What we have here is lobbying and meddling by patent lawyers and other who stand to profit from more litigation in more places. Team UPC (people from the inside) is still at it in spite of Brexit, but what will they say when it all fizzles and goes away? Over the past few weeks we saw very little coverage about the UPC (virtually none). It seems like it’s dying or at least put on the ice. █
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Posted in America, Europe, Patents at 4:14 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Without patent quality, convergence is reached near registration/filing rather than proper examination (but with a hefty price tag)
I left my bank when it bragged about giving a mortgage to nine out of ten applicants
Summary: The Government Accountability Office in the United States produces reports which can serve as a timely warning sign to the European Patent Office, where patent quality is rapidly declining in order to meet ‘production’ goals
THE USPTO has been scrutinised here for a number of years primarily because of patent quality (or lack thereof). Few people can honestly say that it’s hard to get granted a patent at the USPTO (there are like 10 million of them and one single company like IBM can gain 7,355 patents in just one year). Recent figures suggest that eventually 92% of applications are “successful”, so what kind of quality control is that? Engineers at Sun once joked about how silly an application can be accepted and even competed over this as applicants (to see who gets the stupidest patent claims through the examiners). A lot of granted patents are simply dubious, but small companies would not be able to afford challenging them in court (or it would be a lot more expensive than simply settling).
“When the Government Accountability Office (GAO) asks for improvement in patent quality it also alludes to patent scope and software patents explicitly.”Matt Levy, who habitually complains about patent trolls and even about software patents (in his more recent articles), has just mentioned the US Government Accountability Office's rant about US patent quality (which we first wrote about last week). He says [1, 2] that “[e]ven if you’re not a patent lawyer, you’ve probably noticed that patents have been in the news more. The growing problem of patent trolls, companies who make their money by suing other companies for patent infringement, has been the primary reason. Patent trolls now account for nearly two-thirds of all patent infringement lawsuits, draining billions of dollars away from productive companies.”
According to this article (behind paywall) a “US High Court Restores Treble Damages For Patent Infringement,” which means that things are not necessarily improving.
When the Government Accountability Office (GAO) asks for improvement in patent quality it also alludes to patent scope and software patents explicitly. Benjamin Henrion said that “improving quality does not mean much for the average programmer, just more spam.” Well, in practice, raising the bar may mean that few software patents would be authorised at all (both at the courts and the patent office). That’s definitely a step forward. IBM’s Manny Schecter, a longtime proponent of software patents, was yammering that: “Backlog easy to measure, quality not, but…”
Backlog depends on the number of examiners or the lenience of examination. There are some correlations there and under David Kappos, who had joined from IBM, the USPTO tackled backlog by just granting lots of things faster (basically the same error Battistelli and his goons make at the EPO).
Here is a good article about the GAO report. It says: “The Patent and Trademark Office, at a time of rising lawsuits charging patent infringements, needs to improve quality and better monitor examiners’ work, a watchdog found.
“This is not a sign of innovation. Quite the contrary.”“In a pair of reports and staff survey released on Wednesday, the Government Accountability Office said that patent examiners report being pressed for time as they process patent applications without a consistent and clear definition of quality.
““District court filings of new patent infringement lawsuits increased from about 2,000 in 2007 to more than 5,000 in 2015, while the number of defendants named in these lawsuits increased from 5,000 to 8,000 over the same period,” GAO wrote in one report addressing quality in intellectual property protections.”
This is not a sign of innovation. Quite the contrary. A patent trolls expert (he conducted academic studies on the subject), Professor James Bessen, said: “The GAO finds Patent Office issues 1000s of “unclear & overly broad” patents, causing excessive litigation” (“Stop issuing Software Patents & there wouldn’t be a backlog” was one response to this).
“Most disputes concern new computer technology and software,” according to another new article about the GAO study/reports. Just like in the EPO, the US office is “focusing too much on the timeliness of reviews, customer service and “process or production goals” rather than quality.”
It’s added that “[e]xaminers are rated largely on their production, auditors said, and they are given different times” and “GAO recommended that the agency define what is a good patent, update its performance goals for reviewers” (the same should be done at the EPO). █
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Posted in GNU/Linux, Google, Microsoft, Patents at 3:26 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: Highlighting just two of the many entities that Microsoft (and partners) use in order to induce additional costs on Free (as in freedom) software
AN article from exactly 5 years ago spoke about Intellectual Ventures, Microsoft’s largest patent troll. To quote the outline from BoingBoing: “NPR’s Planet Money looks at Intellectual Ventures, the patent-exploitation firm started by former Microsoft CTO Nathan Myhrvold. Intellectual Ventures presents itself as a firm that goes to bat for inventors, buying up their patents with the intention of getting big guys who abuse them to pay up. But the reality discovered by Planet Money is very different: Intellectual Ventures doesn’t put up very many compelling reference customers for their “protecting and enriching inventors” mandate, but there are examples of patents being sold on again to out-and-out trolls who make nothing but lawsuits, using shaky patents to attack big and small firms and extract rent from them. It appears there’s even a town in Texas where empty office buildings house the “headquarters” of shell companies who buy poor-quality patents from distressed companies and get big judgements from a sympathetic local court. Overall, Planet Money paints a picture of software patent aggregators like IV as parasitic bullies who use their enormous patent portfolios to intimidate other firms into paying fees that end up being incorporated into the prices that you and I pay when we buy goods and services.”
Well, Intellectual Ventures is still being treated so favourably by IAM, which receives money from patent trolls and sets up events for them. Today it said that “a slowdown in buying activity at Intellectual Ventures (IV) has been highlighted as having had a substantial impact on Transpacific’s income.”
Layoffs at Intellectual Ventures have been mentioned over the past couple of years, but as Intellectual Ventures is not Microsoft’s only weapon we can look further into another new IAM article which says: “Recently published research has shed new light on the strategies employed by the world’s three leading sovereign patent funds (SPFs) – while discussion about the creation of similar entities in other countries appears to be picking up.”
Towards the end it says that “$4.5 billion eventually paid for it by the Rockstar consortium,” which is a Microsoft-connected patent troll we wrote about in past years. This is the troll which already targets Android/Linux with lawsuits [1, 2, 3, 4], just as Intellectual Ventures did (albeit less directly). █
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07.24.16
Posted in America, Europe, Patents at 4:49 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: Some analysis of the input from the Government Accountability Office (GAO) with focus on the EPO and software patents
Regarding the “EPO and USPTO,” one reader told us over the weekend, there is some curious text which is worth examining/scrutinising further. Just before the weekend we wrote about GAO's input, which mostly chastised the USPTO over patent quality. A closer look reveals even more about the subject.
“This helps highlight existing problems and there is a lot that the EPO can learn from this.”Here are direct links to the report/s [1, 2]. One reader asked us, “did you get these documents?” These were mentioned very quickly by good blogs like Patently-O, so we noticed them very promptly and commented on these based on concise coverage, not based on a thorough reading of the entire text. “The EPO had no comments on the draft,” our reader told us. “In GAO-16-490,” for example “see e.g. p.25-28 on quality / time, effect of “corridors” (high grades -> higher production), also GAO-16-479: see p.21-22…”
To quote from the text: “The Government Accountability Office has released two reports: one suggesting the USPTO should define quality, reassess incentives and improve clarity; the other suggesting the USPTO should strengthen search capabilities and better monitor examiners’ work…”
This helps highlight existing problems and there is a lot that the EPO can learn from this. To quote one new comment about the EPO: “Some weeks ago the Central Staff Committee [CSC] published a paper about overcapacity and reducing stocks, they also mentioned the contracts for examiners. I heard that a director in The Hague sent a mail to his examiners in which he disproved all the numbers as given by the CSC, showing that their publication was misleading. Does anyone have a copy of this mail? Some facts would be useful for this discussion!”
If anyone has a copy, please send it to us. There is a growing (and legitimate) concern about patent quality at the EPO, especially after Battistelli took over and derailed various processes, not just oversight, appeals, etc.
“With PTAB and Alice there has already been a turn for the better, but not every outcome is positive.”Based on WIPR‘s coverage of the GAO report, “most patent cases involve software-related inventions [...] that are easy to “unintentionally infringe” (this does not surprise us as we have been arguing this for years).
IAM too (an EPO mouthpiece) responded to these findings regarding USPTO patent quality being so low, reaffirming what we have said for a decade or more.
To quote IAM: “The recent report on USPTO patent quality by the Government Accountability Office (GAO) would not have made for easy reading at the agency. That said, its leadership presumably knew what was coming long before they saw a draft of the report prior to its general release. The office knows it has a problem with quality – raising the standard of grants wouldn’t have become such a banner issue of Director Michelle Lee’s time in charge if it didn’t.”
“They want to keep their cake (software patents) and eat it too.”With PTAB and Alice there has already been a turn for the better, but not every outcome is positive. Watch this new article by Ricardo Ochoa of PretiFlaherty. Weeks later, well after the Bascom case, patent law firms still exploit an exceptional case for software patents promotion. If they wish to be honest, they will admit that software patents are neither justified nor easy to defend in a court, as per evidence which exists everywhere.
WatchTroll, the most vocal proponent of software patents out there, wrote today about Alice. Here is a key sentence: “Those who have been involved in patent prosecution going back 12-15 years will recall that after the initial rush of business method patents began, in about 2002, the Patent Office instituted what they referred to as “second pair of eyes” review. Under no circumstances could a patent be issued on anything that related to a computer-implemented invention unless and until it had been approved by two separate patent examiners. It certainly sounds like that is what is happening once again.”
It’s about time too. They would not grant a “computer-implemented invention [CII is another term or euphemism for software patents] unless and until it had been approved by two separate patent examiners,” but still, what guidelines would these examiners follow? The USPTO has not been exactly enthusiastic about altering the rules in lieu with Alice. We wrote about the latest changes a week ago and these probably give too much weight to the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit (CAFC), which is where software patents came from in the first place.
As Benjamin Henrion (FFII) put it earlier today, “why should programmers respect patent law? we should benefit from free speech, not patent censorship.”
As Deb Nicholson from the Open Invention Network (OIN) put it not too long ago, as per this report about her talk (“The state of software patents after the Alice decision”):
Combating software patents—and other abuses of the patent system, like design patents—is a long-term process, Nicholson reminded the audience. OIN runs several programs it hopes will protect free-software developers from the ills of bad patents, such as its Linux patent pool, the License On Transfer Network, and Defensive Publications.
But Nicholson told the crowd there are other ways they can help improve the patent landscape in the long term, too. They can contribute to the campaigns run by non-profit organizations like the Electronic Frontier Foundation and the Free Software Foundation, she said. Both are working to oppose the software-oriented provisions in the TPP, for example, among their other activities.
Individuals can also be powerful advocates for change within their own companies, pushing them to embrace a defensive, rather than offensive, approach to patents. And they can support the pending patent-reform legislation to lawmakers. Finally, they can continue to advocate for free and open-source software. The more we collaborate together, Nicholson said, the less we’ll want to sue each other.
The problem is though, as we last noted just over week ago, OIN does virtually nothing to stop software patents. Given the companies that formed it and steer this massive aggregate, it’s not hard to see why. They want to keep their cake (software patents) and eat it too. █
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Posted in America, Apple, Asia, Europe, Patents, Samsung at 4:09 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
“The most dangerous moment for a bad government is when it begins to reform.”
–Alexis de Tocqueville
Summary: Highlighting some of the differences between the US patent system and other patent systems
THE most notable deficiency at the USPTO right now pertains to overly broad patent scope and poor patent quality (the same direction which the EPO takes under Battistelli) and this leads to a lot of litigation by patent trolls. Startups (sometimes known here as SMEs) suffer the most and we rarely hear their stories because they must settle in secret and pay ‘protection money’ to non-practising entities. This clearly does not promote innovation. A lot of this activity, perhaps more than 90% of it (on a global scale), happens in the United States.
“It says a lot about what the USPTO fosters and why the EPO must not follow the same footsteps.”As of days ago, Ericsson’s case (via a patent troll it increasing uses inside Europe) against Apple found momentum at the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit (CAFC), home of software patents, according to this short report and BlackBerry has just beaten Mobile Telecommunications LLC, after this apparent troll (whose whole public existence revolves around this lawsuit) started a high-profile patent case in the US (BlackBerry is Canadian, but it can be dragged down south).
Leading Android OEMs are also embroiled in a patent war in the far east (Asia) and there are lots of articles about it [1, 2, 3, 4] (many hundreds in English alone, so they should not be hard to find even several years down the line).
What’s worth noting here is that in Asia, where a lot of the world’s phones are actually being made, patent trolls are hardly even a topic, whereas in the US patent trolls have become an epidemic. They are sometimes proxies of large companies such as Ericsson. In the case of Nokia, Microsoft has already created or armed trolls using its patents.
It is important to realise the difference between two manufacturing Android giants like Samsung (Kroea’s domain leader) and Huawei (China’s domain leader) having patent disputes and some random LLC du jour trying to tax large companies as well as small ones (these latter cases rarely make any headlines). It says a lot about what the USPTO fosters and why the EPO must not follow the same footsteps. █
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07.22.16
Posted in Europe, Patents, Rumour at 10:05 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Wouldn’t that be metaphorical given Battistelli's plan (all along) for the boards and mistreatment of ill staff?
Reference: The Killing of Psychiatric Patients in Nazi-Germany between 1939 – 1945 [PDF]
Summary: Not only the Staff Union of the European Patent Office (SUEPO) is under severe attack and possibly in mortal danger; the increasingly understaffed Boards of Appeal too are coming under attack and may (according to rumours) be sent to Haar, a good distance away from Munich and the airport (half an hour drive), not to mention lack of facilities for visitors from overseas
SUEPO (the only dominant EPO trade/staff union) leaders must be busy with their legal cases against EPO management (one to start/resume upon appeal later this year in the Supreme Court at The Hague, the other one having just started exactly a week ago), so it is not saying much about the monumental injustices at the EPO, at least not publicly. Having said that, anonymous voices continue to appear at IP Kat‘s comments, in spite of lack of coverage there about the EPO’s situation (nothing for weeks now).
A few comments there are floating new rumours about the fate of the appeal boards after they got punished for disloyalty (to Battistelli, not to the Office or the Organisation). Much of this began with a discussion about the UPC, which all along threatened to make the appeal boards obsolete, in due time. The UPC was first brought up in light of the decline/demise of justice at patent courts, as we noted a couple of hours ago (tackling patent examination justice). To quote the whole comment:
What good will it be to them to have good patents if their competitors can shut them down with vague and broad patents at the UPC?
A very important fact has been forgotten in Merpel’s article: the president of the council did not distanciate himself from the interference from Battistelli. Look at the text of the decision. Basically, what this means is that both the council and Battistelli view the enlarged board of appeal as subordinate to them and not as independent. The council did not object in their latest session.
In plain words: the enlarged board of appeal was expected to simply rubber-stamp a decision already taken. Even if the investigation was fraught with problems as some of the earliest comments in this thread noted.
These are the standards of justice of Battistelli and, we now understand, from the council. That is basically what the decision says.
Now, the all new UPC is created behind closed doors by the very same persons. How high do you expect the judicial standards of the new court to be?
Bonus question: how do you expect your clients to protect themselves against future decisions of the UPC?
There is a direct response to the above concerns about the UPC. “The danger comes when a court (UPC or any other) starts with a presumption of validity, just because it’s a European patent,” the following comment notes, reminding us of what happens in the USPTO and US courts, especially the ones in Texas:
Not sure I follow the logic here. I’m not saying that the national route produces stronger patents. I’m saying that, whereas the EPO previously provided a useful due diligence service (search and examination), this has now been diluted to the point where the national offices offer a competitive and lower-risk alternative.
Crap patents are fine, just as long as everyone recognises that they’re crap. The danger comes when a court (UPC or any other) starts with a presumption of validity, just because it’s a European patent.
An anonymous response to this said:
Crap patents are not fine, even the USPTO is getting convinced. And if the UPC independence is of the same kind as the enlarged board of appeal indepence, that is not fine either.
The article above describes a very serious problem. In most countries, interfering with the independence of justice would trigger a constitutional crisis.
In response to that, once again, the Turkey analogies came up:
The article above describes a very serious problem. In most countries, interfering with the independence of justice would trigger a constitutional crisis.
Apart from Turkey where a constitutional crisis triggers an interference with the independence of justice … 
“The Boards of Appeal are now paying a very high price for asserting their independence,” noted the following commenter, correctly insinuating that this ‘exile’ (not as far as Vienna as feared last year) is a sort of punishment:
The Boards of Appeal are now paying a very high price for asserting their independence. Following the approval by the Administrative Council of the reform proposed by Mr Battistelli, they will firstly be exiled to a corner of the Munich area, viz. Haar, which is very well known for its psychiatric hospital, possibly a humorous touch introduced by the president.
Secondly, renewal of the members’ appointment every five years, which used to be the default (in fact, it has never happened that a member was not re-appointed) is now subject to, among other, a performance evaluation. Coupled with another element of the proposal, i.e. to increase the cost coverage for appeals from 6,3% to 20-25%, firstly by increasing the members’ productivity, there will now be a high pressure on members to focus on production if they don’t want to lose their job. And if they lose their job, taking up another job will now only be possible after approval by the Administrative Council.
Finally, Board of Appeal members will be excluded from “step advancements”, which are open to all other staff at the EPO, i.e. the members’ salaries will be frozen.
It was already known that if Mr Battistelli doesn’t like you, he will hit hard. He has proven this again with the reform package for the Boards of Appeal.
Here is more about the Haar rumour:
Do you have good reason for believing that the BoA will be moved to Haar?
EPO – CA-43-16 Rev. 1:
“As a main precondition, criteria like good traffic links and appropriate accommodation standards were taken into account”.
Although I do not know much about it, I doubt that Haar would satisfy this main precondition. For a start, there appear to be very limited hotel and restaurant facilities in the immediate vicinity of the S-Bahn stop, which is itself a significantly longer journey (by S-Bahn) to / from the airport.
Also, is there not going to be any consultation with users about this? If the decision is Haar, then I can envisage the users getting hopping mad about this – especially as they would be paying significantly more in appeal fees for the “privilege” of having an additional journey out of Munich centre to stay in hotels that may be unappealing to some. And all to address what the users have consistently argued was a non-issue, whilst no real progress (in fact, quite the opposite) has been made in addressing the substantive issues relating to the independence of the BoAs.
I know that a proposal for a new BoA location has to be put to the Budget and Finance Committee, but am unsure if the AC needs to take a formal decision upon that proposal. If so, then it looks like users will need to engage in intensive lobbying of AC representatives if the proposal really is for somewhere outside of Munich centre.
And responding to the above one person wrote:
Like someone wrote above, GET REAL.
What consultations were there in the first place regarding the so-called “reform” of the BoA? What was the public’s input in that hastily load of garbage pompously called a “plan”?
Were the outcries of the public, judges, etc. heeded when a BoA member was given the virtual sack for what was apparently a crime of lèse-majesté?
The latest comment was posted this morning and said:
If the rumours are true, it looks EPO will be gaining an office that is outside of Munich city centre and that (compared to the Isar building) is more difficult for visitors to Munich to reach and is by far less well supplied with hotel accommodation, restaurants and other facilities that such visitors will need.
If the EPO management were being truly practical about this, then they would decide that such an office really ought to be occupied by the department(s) of the EPO that receive the fewest visitors. Given that pretty much everything that the Boards of Appeal do involves summoning visitors to Munich, I am certain that it makes no sense whatsoever to move them to Haar.
With this in mind, if the EPO president really is determined to physically separate the two current residents of the Isar building, then logic dictates that it really ought to be the other resident (that is, the president himself) who moves to Haar. Anyone up for lobbying the representatives to the AC to vote for this alternative?
Well, “lobbying the representatives to the AC,” as the above put it, might be an exercise in futility given their demonstration of (almost) blind loyalty to Battistelli in the last AC meeting. One person earlier on wrote:
The Enlarged Board of appeal did not rubber-stamped the decision that the president and the council asked them.
Probably for this reason they are going to be moved, although several suitable buildings are available in Munich, to Haar, a village outside Munich mostly known for its lunatic asylum.
Next time they will think twice before taking a decision that does not please BB or the council.
So much for the judicial independence.
There is no judicial independence and there is no justice at the EPO anymore. To make matters worse, as one commenter put it:
It seems that some applicants have their offices in the same building complex.
The board members will improve their perceived independence by discussing the inventions directly with the inventors at lunch.
Yes, exactly. What a horrible move that would be. Instead of sending the boards to Haar maybe it’s time to send Battistelli to Haar. As one of the above comments noted, Haar “is very well known for its psychiatric hospital,” which sounds like something Battistelli could use. They can give him some toys to break rather than let him break people (and lives or even families as per the recent survey) at the EPO. █
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Posted in Europe, Patents at 9:19 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Another French term in Benoît Battistelli’s EPO after his de facto coup d’état
Reference: The Intercept (among many more at the time)
Summary: Public responses to the role played by Albert Keyack on behalf of the United States inside the European [sic] Patent Office
TECHRIGHTS is not a political site in nature, but sometimes it’s impossible to avoid a little bit of politics. Half a decade ago we wrote about the Brazil-based US Ambassador Sobel (now Republican fundraiser) lobbying/working for Microsoft in Brazil in his capacity as a diplomat (Microsoft Brazil President at the time was Michel Levy) — a subject on which we expanded in later posts on the subject, citing diplomatic cables leaked by Chelsea Manning quite shortly thereafter. Corruption levels in Brazil are relatively high and some people try to capitalise on weak regulatory powers. It kind of sounds like Benoît Battistelli and his EPO cronies, but it’s not. We used to say that the only European thing about the European [sic] Patent Office is the staff, but right now even the (external) PR team belongs to a US company (meddling inside European media) and some of the staff — at partial capacity at least — is from the US.
Days ago we wrote about Albert Keyack's new role at the EPO (announced only internally). Keyack is not an EU national. The following comment cites Techrights and says:
Sovereign principality of EPOnia appoints consul to the United States.
My mind is so boggled that it’s becoming numb.
Well, Battistelli breaks the rules, including his very own Code of Conduct, so the above isn’t thoroughly shocking. What’s interesting are the following legitimate points about the sovereignty of the EPO and issues pertaining to loyalty. As one person put it, “could he rather be the US envoy to the province of EPOnia, like Rome or Imperial Britain” (as Battistelli serves the 1% and thinks of himself in Napoleonic ways, the analogy seems apt). Here is the comment in full:
Nomination of Albert Keyack als “EPO Attaché”:
Keyack was reporting from the US Embassy in Brazil as least as late as May 2015, and had an E-mail address from the State Department. That was only one year ago.
The tone of his report linked above reflects the orthodox US foreign policy on “IP”, and Keyack’s affiliation is given to be with the USPTO.
It is rather ironical that the President who wants to control for two full years the lives of anyone “disloyal” enough to leave the EPO actually hired someone whose was serving a “competing” patent office. Isn’t there a line somewhere in whatever is left of the Codex about not accepting any instructions from foreign governments?
Or is the fellow hired on a service contract concluded with an entity created ad hoc for this purpose?
Whose interests is he actually representing? Europe’s? (And then, what is that position, and who defines it?) EPOnia’s? (ditto) European or US industry? Small applicants?
Or could he rather be the US envoy to the province of EPOnia, like Rome or Imperial Britain sent governors to their vanquished peoples? (If then, why should he be paid by the EPO?)
The President does have a little leeway under the Codex to appoint staff under the EPC from states which are soon to become EPC signatories. Could the US accede the EPC? Is EPOnia about to be moved somewhere in Virginia?
Here is another comment which explains why it’s improper or inappropriate:
I thought the ServRegs forbid to hire nationals of non-EPC member states (actually, other way around: allows only hiring of employees with a nationality of member states)…. The last time I checked, the USoA was not a signatory of the EPC…
But then, this person is granted an easy income the next few years, for virtually nothing. Whatever he does will not influence filing strategies anyway….
And since he’s neither French, Corsican, or Croatian, nepotism seems to be less of a problem this time….
Man, I chose the wrong career… But then, I love my job…
Incidentally, in response to “Use of English as an official EU language” (by CIPA) Benjamin Henrion wrote “as long as other languages are not discriminated like for the horrible “automated translations” Unitary Patent deal.”
Well, the EPO’s management now brags about US stakeholders being dominant, even if no country in ‘mainland’ Europe has English as its main language (only a few islands do). MIP’s latest catchup with Canada on trademarks and patents speaks about “Brexit putting the brakes on CETA” and says (the complete summary of the latter part): “A dismissal of a suit against Pfizer indicating consumers cannot be compensated for expenditures on invalidated patents, the NAFTA arbitration hearing of Eli Lilly’s complaint against the government, IP agents getting confidentiality privilege, the Federal Court awarding Janssen nearly C$20 million, and Brexit putting the brakes on CETA were among recent Canadian patent stories” (Brexit also undermines the UPC, as we noted here many times before).
Well, even after Brexit (assuming it happens) the US is working to impose TTIP/ISDS on Britain, reveals the latest article from Dr. Glyn Moody. It’s not hard to see who often holds the leash. We’ll say more on that in our next post. █
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