LAWBREAKING & EPO MAFIA
Photo: Techrights
The buzzwords utilised by António Campinos were mentioned last month in his first ‘proper’ interview with IAM, which was full of software patents advocacy. The EPO nowadays pretends that everything “digital” or anything with a “computer” or with “software” is patentable. In that regard, Campinos is even worse than his predecessor. Many people will be misled and mistaken because of “Brand Campinos”, wrongly assuming that he’s always somehow better in every way. Remember that two years on the job already Campinos still blocks access to Techrights. Does that sound democratic to anyone? More like China.
Campinos still exploits his dead father to pretend he’s alright. But the EPC is being violated by the EPO every day. Campinos breaks the law every day. This is very much true under Campinos — no less than it was true under Battistelli. It’s just that the media hardly talks about it anymore. A few days ago the EPO tweeted (most of the official EPO communications nowadays come from Twitter and Microsoft, two American companies). “Do you regularly use our EPC and PCT-EPO Guidelines? If so, don’t miss this opportunity to tell us what you think of them. There are only 6 days left to submit your feedback.”
There were many tweets like that recently, including another from around the same time, which said: “Are the EPC and PCT-EPO Guidelines relevant for your work? Contribute to their revision by submitting your feedback on them here: https://bit.ly/2TBX3aI”
As one can expect, submissions will mostly come from law firms. The general public is mostly kept in the dark and discarded/demoted by the EPO (there’s no option there for those who aren’t applicants or law firms).
“Sometimes patent searching can become very complicated,” the EPO tweeted, “while some technical fields throw up difficulties for patent searchers by their very nature. How do our examiners rise to such challenges?”
If in doubt, they grand, just like examiners of the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO), even post-Alice/35 U.S.C. § 101. So the lower the hiring standards, the more wrongly-granted patents will be counted. The EPO is in that sense incentivised not to hire people smart enough to demonstrate ineligibility (for rejection). The staff representatives have already complained that examiners are being assigned to deal with patent applications outside their field of expertise.
So how can the EPO maintain this illusion of compliance with the EPC? Too many European Patents (EPs) are Invalid Patents (IPs) these days and it’s going to become a major blunder somewhere down the line. As we explained in the previous post, the EPO now mimics the Chinese model, which is basically a ‘mad house’ of patent grants. The goal is only to grant more and more patents, not to improve their quality.
A few years ago we leaked some internal communications that showed the EPO was very well aware this. Here’s one example. The EPO’s response to such leaks was sheer aggression, i.e. the usual. The management of the EPO sent several law firms from London to go after me and threaten me. Why? For exposing internal communications, highlighting EPO abuses and corruption.
A couple of days ago Benjamin Henrion shared a similar story when he said: “The Coronabonds closed doors meetings remembers me the software patent directive in Council: the in-video speeches were a show and staged in advance, everything was decided in a diner the sunday before. Diplomats like secrecy […] I even had a ‘fight’ with the chief of the Luxemburgish patent office, who accused us of leaking the minutes of some closed Council meeting, which showed that Council wanted to rubberstamp the directive super quickly if the Parliament approved it.”
I’ll never forget how the EPO attempted to silence me (apparently it did similar things to IP Kat, culminating in complete ban of the whole site). That was back when media actually blasted the EPO for its abuses, about 4 years ago in 2015-2016. Back then the media also played along with EPO lies. Some of the media still believed and relayed many of the lies. Notice Benoît Battistelli quoted this old article from Rosie Spinks at The ‘Guardian’. The article contains serious lies, such as “UK will vote on its European future just as the EU finalises a new patent system…”
The UPC was already pretty much dead just months after she had published it. This is how she introduced it: “The unitary patent is set to be granted by the EPO and will be valid in 26 countries, with a centralised court of enforcement known as the Unified Patent Court (UPC). It was conceived as a way to cut down on the cost, administration and red-tape of filing and enforcing a patent across many European jurisdictions. Under the unitary system, those seeking patent protection in multiple markets can file a single application to the EPO, and if granted, see it have immediate effect across all relevant states and pay a single renewal fee.”
Citing thugs from Fieldfisher — that Mafia of the EPO (it sent its employee with the surname “Capone” to repeatedly threaten me) — Rosie Spinks at The ‘Guardian’ proceeded to spread lies about what the UPC/A means to SMEs. The ‘Guardian’ wrote: “David Knight, a partner in law firm Fieldfisher’s intellectual property and technology team, added that if the Brexit were to occur, British SMEs who needed patent protection across Europe could still file for the unitary patent — as can any foreign company — it just wouldn’t include patent protection at home as part of the package.”
This is the same firm that the EPO paid to threaten me. Rosie Spinks at The ‘Guardian’ was back then mentioning “SMEs” like a couple dozen times, quoting EPO and law firms but not actual SMEs. We can only guess that printing lies is business as usual for this ‘news’ paper…
This was only a few months after the legal threats from Fieldfisher’s Mr. Capone. Later on they’ll tell us how gentle and respectful the Office is. They’ll tell us they mourn dead Italians (Coronavirus victims) while sending Mafia like Capone (literally Capone!) after their critics. Some friendly patent office, eh? No better than the extortion artists known as patent trolls.
