Fewer EU Patents: Good - and Bad

First the good news:

Last year, the European Patent Office (EPO) issued far fewer patents than in 2006. The Munich patent authorities have announced that they approved exactly 54,699 patent applications for commercial protection, 12.9 per cent fewer than in the previous year. EPO President Alison Brimelow says the drop is the result of a new focus on the quality of patents rather than quantity; patent applications actually increased by 3.9 per cent to 140,700. She said her office is making sure that the temporary monopoly rights granted are actually relevant. She says the figures show that the EPO is headed in the right direction.

Well, maybe, but heise online also has this to say:

Nonetheless, the EPO staff's morale seems to have never been lower. A survey conducted among several thousand staff members found that only 4 per cent have faith in the management board. Only 6 per cent said they were satisfied with their direct superiors and the president. The auditors have also long been complaining that they are chronically overworked.

Last April, Brimelow herself complained that the backlog of work at the EPA and the other two largest patent offices in the US and Japan was only growing and could no longer be handled by current staff.

So fewer patents may well simply be the result of the fact that the EPO is getting swamped, and that quality will actually go down, not up. In any case, the EPO's own cries for help demonstrate that the idea of giving the EPO any more power through a unified European patent system is madness.

Copying Patent Stupidity

I thought patents were supposed to stop copying, and yet here we have the European Union trying to copy an American idea that has led almost total meltdown of the US patent system:

The core of the proposal is the creation of an European Judge Academy and a specialized Patent Court under the pillar of the European Court of Justice (ECJ).

Brigitte Zypries, the German minister of Justice, wants this court not to be lead by regularly appointed judges, but by so-called technical experts. She promises better examination of the technical substance of the patents in corresponding processes. These technical experts are basically just another name for Patent Agents who have passed the Judge Academy.

Essentially, this makes the same people who decide what patents should be granted the ones who decide whether that was the correct decision. Oh yeah, that's a good idea.

No EU Software Patents?

Hm, were this not on the European Patent Office's own site, I might have doubted its authenticity:

Where do we stand in the discussion about patents on computer-implemented inventions (CII patents) two years after rejection in the European Parliament? This was the perspective under which the EPO had invited members of the European Parliament, representatives from industry and enterprise, NGOs and IP specialists to review developments since the rejection of the CII directive.

The bottom line (literally)?

All speakers welcomed unequivocally the opportunity to discuss the issue at a high level and made clear that a new CII debate followed by legal modifications was neither necessary nor desirable.

Wearing my cynical journalist's hat, I suppose this might mean that companies in favour of software patents (like SAP, which emerges once again as the Big Baddie of Europe in all this), think they'll be able to squeeze through their wretched computer implemented inventions under the present scheme.

Still, the EPO story's headline "No revival of software patents debate" is a good marker to have. (Via Slashdot.)

EU Software Patents Battle 2.0

Florian Mueller, who did more than most to rally people against the software patents directive in the European Parliament, has flagged up the next - and potentially even more serious - threat from software patents.

This time, though, it's couched in rather obscure terms. The battle is not about allowing software patents "as such" - since they are explicitly forbidden in Europe - but about how litigation over patents should proceed. The point is, if the current proposal for something called the European Patent Litigation Agreement (EPLA) goes through, the European patent offices, many of which are happily handing out software patents, would have enormous influence over the litigation of such questionable patents, which is hardly right, methinks. As Mueller explains:

The legal status of software patents in Europe is contradictory. While the existing written rules, which go back to the year 1973, disallow patents on computer programs “as such”, the European Patent Office (EPO) and various national patent offices have granted tens of thousands of software patents. However, European patents, even if granted by the EPO, can only be enforced country by country as of now, and national courts declare many EPO software patents invalid when their holders try to use them against alleged infringers. Critics argue that the EPLA would create a new court system that would be under the control of the same group of government officials who already govern the EPO, and that the judges appointed by those people would support the EPO’s granting practice and its broad scope of patentable subject-matter with respect to software and business methods.

It's still very early days for the EPLA, but fore-warned is fore-armed.

A Tiny Victory?

This is all deeply abstruse stuff, but the bottom line is that there seems to be a glimmer sanity in the European Commission's attitude to the European patent system, in the clash between the competencies of the European Union and the European Patent Office (which have little to do with each other), and even with regard to the patentability of software. Or are we being too optimistic?

O Happy, Happy Digital Code

My book Digital Code of Life was partly about the battle to keep genomic and other bioinformatics information open. So it's good to see the very first public genomic database, now EMBL, spreading its wings and mutating into FELICS (Free European Life-science Information and Computational Services) with even more bioinformatics goodies freely available (thanks to a little help from the Swiss Institute for Bioinformatics, the University of Cologne, Germany, and the European Patent Office).