Source: http://eupat.ffii.org/players/epo/index.en.html
Timestamp: 2013-06-20 04:44:17
Document Index: 629974771

Matched Legal Cases: ['Art 52', 'Art 53', 'Art 54', 'Art 56', 'Art 54', 'Art. 123', 'Art 17', 'Art 17']

Software Patents > Players > Organisations > gugde > EU > EPO
The fingerprint is a symbol of "intellectual property", as known from the concept of copyright: the individual creation which other people are unlikely to recreate on their own. The EPO was founded in 1973/1978 with the mission to extend the principle of property in individual creation into the physical world, where forces of nature are harnessed in a peculiar and difficult-to find and easy-to-imitate way. Meanwhile, the EPO is doing just the opposite today: it is granting patents for broad and general principles and extending this practise into the sphere of copyright. Thus the EPO logo symbolises one of several astonishing developments which we are trying to document here.
The special legal construction of the EPO
Dissolving the invention concept of Art 52 EPC
Disrespecting the Exceptions of Art 53 EPC
Eroding the novelty concept of Art 54 EPC
Formal view of Art 56 EPC: Lowest Non-Obviousness Standards of the World
Continuously deteriorating examination quality
BEST: assured worst examination quality, illegally introduced, legalised in 2000
Novelty search problems increasingly complex, EPO lagging far behind
Outlaw zone, poor working climate
National controllers of the EPO aspiring for careers in EPO
EPO Boards of Appeal lack Independence
Withholding Patent Information from the Public
The EPO was the leader, others willingly followed.see Patentjurisprudenz auf Schlitterkurs -- der Preis für die Demontage des Technikbegriffs
see Greenpeace: EPO and friends breaking the Law...
Art 54 EPC says
An invention is deemed new, if it does not belong to the state of the art.
The state of the art is formed by everything that was made accessible to the public before the day of application for the European Patent by written or oral description, by use or in any other way.
From this we can not infer that anything that is not described within one self-contained document is new.Only knowledge that was previously not accessible is new. Knowledge that a person skilled in the art can obtain by reading several documents together is not new. There is not much objective reason for the assumption that a known process must have been disclosed in a single document somewhere. Many informations are not transmitted in written form, and whether something is new or not has little to do with how it has been codified. The German Patent Office has also, at least until recently, not construed novelty in this way. By requiring that the teaching be found in a single document, the EPO has severely weakened the requirement of novelty. At the same time, the non-obvious requirement has been reduced to a means of filling the holes in the novelty requirement which the EPO has opened up. The EPO considers any trivial idea non-obvious, ifonly the previous knowledge about this idea is dispersed in several documents and the person skilled in the art would not automatically have read these documents in context.By weakening requirements such as "novelty", "non-obviousness", "industriality" and "technicity", the EPO has succeeded in greatly increasing the number of patents granted year by year.aOne of the reasons for the continued weakening lies in the fact that patent examiners do not have a practical possibility of rejecting applications: the applicant only needs to write more letters and insist on his legal right of being heard. An examiner cannot afford to bear the blame of violating this right. If an examiner continuously rejects the applicant's demand, he can only agree to an oral proceding. This constitutes a huge burden which the examiner can only afford to shoulder a few times every year. Thus the examiner has only one strategy survival: lower the requirements as far as possible. Thus, in order to justify the granting of a patents, he will usually resort to justifications which, in the eyes of an unprejudiced outsider, may read like enunciations of a mentally ill person.
Before the EPO existed, there was an organisation called IIB (Institut International des Brevets), based in The Hague, with France and BeNeLux as member states. There was no substantial examination, only search.When the EPO was founded in 1978, the IIB was reorganised to become the EPO's Research Directorate (GD 1). At the same time the status of the employees, who held a diplomat's passport, was reduced to that of a kind of pseudo diplomat, and the salary was lowered. This provoked dissatisfaction, and research quality sank.Moreover, due to the newly introduced obligation to grant a "right of being heard", examiners were forced to reply to whatever moronic arguments came from the patent attorney, and was not allowed to reject as long as new arguments kept appearing, unless an oral hearing was carried out. This fact determined that in EPO practise granting (sometimes with slight narrowing of claims) would be the rule and rejection a rare exception.Das Problem mit dem "rechtlichen Gehör" besteht auch in dem Fall, dass der Prüfer die Ansprüche einzuschränken versucht. Da kann sich der Anwalt auf alle möglichen Arten querlegen: sehr beliebt ist bloß mikrometerweise nachgeben oder neue Sätze von Ansprüchen mit etwas anderer Formulierungen und etwas anders gelagertem Umfang. Es muss nur genug in der Gesamtheit offenbart sein, dass sich immer wieder etwas anderes herausgreifen lässt, man also nicht mit Art. 123 (ursprüngliche Offenbarung) nicht in Konflikt kommt. Sehr nützlich hierfür ist eine Beschreibung riesiger Länge (z.B. n x 100 Seiten). Da der Prüfer nur für den Erstbescheid und fuer den Abschluss eines Verfahrens je einen halben Punkt bekommt und eine bestimmte Mindestpunktzahl im Jahr zu erreichen hat (und nur dann Aussicht auf Beförderung hat, wenn er erheblich mehr erreicht), kann er sich nicht allzuviele Bescheide pro Vorgang leisten. Konsequenz: runter mit den Anforderungen und ab durch die Mitte....Those who were very productive, i.e. very permissive, have been promoted to become today's directors, i.e. heads of directorates, which is what the examination divisions are called.Low examination quality has right from the start been an invitable part of this system.20 years ago the examiners still had to accumulate far fewer credits, because the number of applications was lower. This changed quickly, as more and more questionable patents passed through and it became a profitable strategy for the industry to patent any shade of a shade of an innovation. Thus the backlog grew and the examiners had to cope with more applications in less time. This again led to a drop in examination quality, which again spurred a rise in the number of patent applications. And so forth.Moreover in 1991 a clueless statistics commission predicted a drop in the number of applications, whereupon EPO president Brändli decreed to stop hiring examiners. This hiring ban was in force until Brändli's end of term in 1995.In 1995 president Kober came and started to hire in masses. This again was problematic. The EPO's reputation had already been damaged, so that it was difficult to find good people. Also the salary of examiners had not risen in 10 years. Kober aggravated this problem by introducing new so-called negative salary levels, i.e. hiring new examiners at a lower salary than what had been the lowest before. Thus the EPO had to put up with people who would not have found a job in the industry, and these people again had to be trained by the EPO itself. This meant that better examiners had to be freed for education jobs and the ratio of applications to be handled by each examiner grow even more adverse.Meanwhile examination quality has sunk to a point where it can hardly sink any further, and the huge pile of crappy patents accumulated by the EPO has become hard to overlook.
Yet in the mid 90s there was still an untouched potential for further lowering patent examination quality: the separation of search and examination. This separation constituted one of the few remaining incentives that worked in favor of serious examination, and it was based on legal requirements laid down in the EPC. However, starting in the mid 90s, there was a movement in the EPO managment to circumvent this requirement. Under the euphemism "Bringing Search and Examination Together" (BEST), the EPO found ways to break the law, which it then successfully asked the Diplomatic Conference of 2000 to rewrite according to the "BEST practise".Art 17 EPC:
The research departments belong to the branch in The Hague. They are responsible for creating european research reports.
This means: when the Munich-based GD2, which is not subordinate to the Hague branch, began to research on its own in place of GD 1, it was violating Art 17 EPC.GD 2 did this under the pretext that they "wanted to test the electronic research equipment". This equipment, as a sidenote, operated at a level of technology and sophistication which corresponded to that of the 1960s at best and was evidently unusable and by no means worthy of testing.Even some of the applicants had little trust in the BEST practise. A swiss company exlicitely demanded that the EPO should not use it for examining its patents.In november 2000 the Diplomatic Conference agreed to the BEST practise. Although the member states have not yet ratified the amendments of the EPC, the BEST practise has already been generally introduced. Now every examiner conducts both research and substantive examination at the same time. Under the given conditions this means that it is now possible to simply ignore any documents that would make examination work too difficult. In any case it is unlikely that much prior art will be found. The EPO's search tools are much less useful than general Internet search machines (which of course are also by far not good enough), and the IBM VM/CMS style user interface makes them inconvenient to use.Between 1991 and 1993 the examination quality at the EPO was still respectable. At least in some areas (not software), it was considered to be better than that of the USPTO and JPO. After the inauguration of the new examiner's building at Pschorrhöfe (west of Munich central station), deterioration was clearly felt, and it accelerated exponentially starting in 1996. Nowadays the patent examination system at the EPO is no longer anything more than a joke.At the moment (2002) the location agreement of the EPO with the dutch government is ending, and the latter is showing little interest in prolonging it. Meanwhile the EPO is planning new facilities in Munich and hiring en masse, while The Hague (GD 1) has been observing a hiring freeze since 1999.This is apparently an effect of BEST: given that Examination and Search are Brought Together, it is clear that either GD 1 or GD 2 has become superfluous. The fight for survival between the two has been going on for a while already. It looks now as if GD 2 has made it and The Hague will be closed with expiry of the agreement with the Netherlands.The morale in The Hague has thus reached new lows, and with it also the search quality.
Artikel 23(3) EPÜ beteuert zwar die Unabhängigkeit der Beschwerdekammern, leider aber wird er bereits von Artikel 23(1) ausgehebelt:
The Union of Employees at the European Patent Office (EPO) points out a systematic pattern of uncontrolled and illegal behavior by the Administrative Council, the President and other organs of the EPO. This text was displayed in spring of 2002 at the Union's website and later removed. A copy remains conserved in this mailing list archive.
The European Patent Office (EPO) presents a preliminary position on the proposal for a European Directive on the patentability of software innovations and asks its Standing Advisory Committee (SACEPO), a council consisting mainly of corporate patent lawyers, for expression of opinions. The EPO paper refers to the Eurolinux campaign as a "fundamentalist" position promoted by a "strong lobby". It points out that the CEC/BSA proposal is largely but not completely based on EPO positions and names some points where further clarification would be helpful. It also explains the state of deliberations in the Council Working Group and the European Parliament and discloses that the EPO has a seat on the "council working party on intellectual property" as a delegate of the European Commission. The Eurolinux Alliance wonders why it cannot have a seat on this "working party" and on SACEPO.
John Savage, an examiner at the European Patent Office (EPO), had agreed to answer a list of questions from users of Slashdot.com. However, after the questions had been passed to him, he withdrew. Apparently the PR department of the EPO did not want him to engage in this kind of discussion. Other patent examiners have already undergone disciplinary measures because they had engaged in public discussions about their employer.
Text of EPO edition of 1997
http://kwiki.ffii.de/Swpepgl01AEn
As a young scholar in the 70s, Gert Kolle quickly became the leading german theoretician on the limits of patentability with respect to computer programs. Kolle wrote his doctoral thesis at the Max-Planck Institute and Patent Law on this subject and published several deep-searching articles in GRUR from the early 70s to the early 80s. These articles confirmed and refined the view of the courts that there is no room for patenting computer programs if the notion of technical invention is taken seriously. Kolle's works wor often cited by German courts as a foundation for their refusal to grant software patents. Later Kolle became an official at the European Patent Office. Currently he is their head of diplomacy, and he occasionally gives talks where he explains and justifies the current software patenting policy of the EPO.
EPO Employees' Representation
Start by inserting the passages from the EPC
[ Patentbewegung in der Europäischen Union | Aktivitäten der Patentbewegung im Namen der Europäischen Kommission | Den Rat beeinflussen | Europa-Parlament und Softwarepatente | ESC and Software Patents | European Patent Office: High Above Legality ]
http://swpat.ffii.de/gasnu/epo/index.en.html