EU Patent Staff Go On Strike

h4rm0ny writes "Last Friday, staff at the European Patent Office went on strike. They protested outside for several hours and issued a statement claiming that 'the organisation is decentralising and focusing on granting as many patents as possible to gain financially from fees generated.' They also declared this as being disastrous for innovation and that their campaign was not for better wages, but for better quality patents. Meanwhile, an article on it discusses the US's own approach to dealing with the increasing flood of patent applications: a community patent project to help identify prior art. It might sound like a grass-roots scheme, and maybe it is, but those roots include such patent behemoths as IBM. So it looks like on both sides of the Atlantic, some signs of sanity might be emerging in the patent world from those people right in the thick of it." Note, this was a half-day strike, not ongoing.

Comments

Finally!

[WorldInChaos]

Some common sense comes into play! Hopefully something happens as a result of this.

Re:Partial Patent Solution - Hang All The Lawyers!

[thermian]

No, I believe it was Q.

Patents were always a money making scam

[Anonymous Coward]

Furthermore, they've been harmful to innovation since they were introduced.

Of course the EPO staff are correct but the underlying issue runs much deeper. The first step in stopping patent expansion is to deal with the lawyers. These people contribute little to human knowledge and make a fortune gaming the system. Neither the public or fabled inventor benefits from having a legal tax on innovation.

The US program is a sham

[Zontar_Thing_From_Ve]

I've posted on this before. The US program is designed to give the illusion that the patent office is really and truly trying to reform while in reality nothing changes. I'm too lazy to look up the last article on Slashdot about the US project, but if you crunch the numbers it's clear that fewer than 1% of submitted patents are even eligible for the program at all. A handful of patents will be rejected because of it, yes, but by and large the US patent office continues its work to let businesses patent everything possible.

Re:That's europe for ya !

[Anonymous Coward]

Got to admit, it's kind of impressive to see a strike/demonstration for the right to do a quality job, as opposed to the usual wages/hours stuff.

Do we need patents at all?

[mcgrew]

I don't know how the patent system in the UK or other parts of the world work, but in my country (USA) it seems to me fundamentally all right, with four possible areas of necessary reform that I can see:

1. They're granting patents of obvious and trivial ideas. They're not supposed to do this, but they still do
2. Patents cost WAY too much. It is virtually impossible for a middle class person to obtain a patent on anything.
3. Things that are done by everyone in the physical world get patents just because you're doing it with a computer. This is insane IMO.
4. Computer programs have copyright, they don't need nor should they have patents.

The patent system here isn't nearly as fuX0red up as copyright. Copyright reform is far more badly needed than patent reform.

Re:Do we need patents at all?

[bendodge]

I disagree. Patent reform is stifling innovation far more than than the music wars.

Re:Do we need patents at all?

[pjt33]

A copyright is free, twenty to register. Why should a patent cost more?

In theory patent applications are screened by highly trained clerks who reject those which are insufficiently novel, non-trivial, capable of industrial application, or eligible for patent protection. Without getting into arguments about how well this corresponds with practice, it's certainly the case that the patent office has a lot of bureaucracy which must be paid for somehow. The only reasonable options are that everyone pay for it (via taxation), that the owners of profitable patents pay for it (which would inevitably generate accounting practices similar to those seen in Hollywood), that successful applicants pay for it, or that all applicants pay for it. The latter is the only option which doesn't require mechanisms to prevent griefers from filing all kinds of bogus patents at someone else's expense.

Re:Do we need patents at all?

[khallow]

A better solution is to decriminalize patent applications and just get applicants to pay for use of tax payer resources. As is currently done.

Re:Finally - Common Sense!

[gstoddart]

Also, having patents summarized in plain English would be nice for small companies desiring to create products and solutions.

Sadly, there seems to be far more incentive to obfuscate what the patent is actually saying. Either so you can claim it covers almost any conceivable scenario, or so that nobody can identify that you're patenting something trivial and obvious.

Most patent summaries I've ever seen read as bad (if not worse) than legal documents. It also seems the more trivial the patent, the more ridiculous the verbiage.

Cheers

Re:Finally - Common Sense!

[Kainaw]

The bad verbage of patents is not necessarily the patent writer's fault. When I tried to submit a patent, it came back three times demanding that I rewrite it until it made no sense. Then, it was denied because I used the phrase "A person may use..." instead of "A person can use...". In patent-speak, the word "may" means "may not". So, I applied for a patent for an idea that people may not use.