European patent law explicitly excludes computer programs and methods of doing business from patent protection. However, these exclusions are applied in a complicated manner such that it is still possible, in certain circumstances, to obtain European patent protection for inventions devised in a software and/or business context.
Europeans Still Need to Save the European Patent Office From Those Who Attack Its Patent Quality
If the patent office accepts claims that have been invented, published or even patented before, ignoring material prior art, then even existing technologies in use are subject to patent trolling. Reexamination to invalidate the patent based on prior art can be requested, but requests are typically made only after a lawsuit is filed or threatened (about 0.33% of patents in U.S. have re-examination requested)[49] and often in conjunction with an infringement lawsuit.[50] Only the patent holder will participate in this process, and the party requesting the reexamination has no right of appeal and is estopped from using the same evidence in any subsequent civil action; this risk keeps the popularity of reexamination low despite its lower cost.[51][self-published source?] Furthermore, the most common outcome is not the validation or invalidation of the patent, but narrowing the scope of the claims.[50]
Patent trolls operate much like any other company that is protecting and aggressively exploiting a patent portfolio. However, their focus is on obtaining additional money from existing uses, not from seeking out new applications for the technology. They monitor the market for possibly infringing technologies by watching popular products, news coverage and analysis. They also review published patent applications for signs that another company is developing infringing technology, possibly unaware of their own patents. They then develop a plan for how to proceed. They may start by suing a particularly vulnerable company that has much to lose, or little money to defend itself, hoping that an early victory or settlement will establish a precedent to encourage other peer companies to acquiesce to licenses. Alternately they may attack an entire industry at once, hoping to overwhelm it.
Patent trolls are at a disadvantage in at least two ways. First, patent owners who make and sell their invention are entitled to awards of lost profits. However, patent trolls, being non-manufacturers, typically do not qualify.[citation needed] Further, patent owners' rights to bar infringers from manufacture, use, or sale of technologies that infringe their patents has been curtailed in the 2006 court decision eBay v. MercExchange. Rather than automatically granting an injunction, the US Supreme Court stated that courts must apply a standard reasonableness test to determine if an injunction is warranted. Writing in Forbes about the impact of this case on patent trolls, writer Jessica Holzer concludes: "The high court's decision deals a blow to patent trolls, which are notorious for using the threat of permanent injunction to extort hefty fees in licensing negotiations as well as huge settlements from companies they have accused of infringing. Often, those settlements can be far greater than the value of the infringing technology: Recall the $612.5 million that Canada's Research in Motion forked over to patent-holding company NTP, Inc., to avoid the shutting down of its popular BlackBerry service."[73]
When the Pilgrims left England, they obtained permission from the King of England to settle on land farther to the south near the mouth of the Hudson River (in present-day New York). Because they chose to remain where they landed in New England, they needed a new permission (called a patent) to settle there. On November 11, 1620, needing to maintain order and establish a civil society while they waited for this new patent, the adult male passengers signed the Mayflower Compact.
The patent field requires a fair amount of substantive technical knowledge, and I think that is one of their core advantages. They can attack technical talents from a variety of ways. The attorneys have well-grounded, legitimate training in the technical arts.
Therefore, it is clear from the outset that the number of granted patents per year is NOT an indicator of efficiency per se. If the quality of the examination is insufficient, then the efficiency of the examination process is likewise insufficient, because the process does not serve the intended task or purpose.
Yes. Patentees can still apply directly for national patents at the relevant national patent offices and alternatively/additionally for European patents at the EPO. The latter can be validated as a non-unitary bundle of European national rights (as is the case now) or as a UP plus national validations in non-UP states. These rights can co-exist, subject to double-patenting rules that may apply in particular countries.
A party wishing to ensure that its revocation action remains in the Central Division will therefore need to commence revocation proceedings in time for those proceedings to come to trial before any infringement action can be commenced in order to avoid the risk that the revocation claim may end up being heard in the Local or Regional Division chosen by the patentee for the infringement claim rather than in the Central Division.
One consequence of the decision of the UK to leave the European Union is that the UK has also withdrawn from the unitary patent and UPC project. The UK had ratified the UPC Agreement but this ratification was withdrawn. The remaining countries are continuing their plans to implement the UP and UPC. As mentioned above, a key decision that still has to made is the new location of the branch of the Central Division that was previously going to be located in London.
Whilst none of this changes the way European patent applications are filed and prosecuted, the departure of the UK means that the unitary patent can no longer cover the UK. Patent applicants, who very often only validate European patents in two or three countries, will need to decide whether the cost of a unitary patent is still justified, or whether to validate their European patents only on a national basis.
Ultimately, patents exist to provide incentives to invent and are seen as a solution to solve the market failure of public goods (Landes & Posner, 2003). A patent gives the right to exclude other drug companies from copying the drug that is made by another company for a certain period of time, which usually extends to twenty years. The patent period starts from the moment the patent seeker files a request to the relevant patent office in a certain territory. The patent is essentially a monopoly right that is being issued by the government (Vanhees, 2016). The invention, protected by the patent, can only be used by the patent holder or the companies that are able to get a license from the patent holder (or by buying the patent itself).
In Europe, there are four legal requirements, namely, invention, novelty, inventive step and industrial application obtain a patent from the European Patent Office (EPO). EPO is a centralized office created by the European Patent Convention, which has 38 Member States. It provides a single patent grant procedure but not a single patent from the point of view of enforcement. Hence, the patents granted are not European Union patents or even Europe-wide patents but a bundle of national patents. In other words, it is not possible to file an application to the European Patent Office for a patent that, when approved, would protect the invention in the territory of all the members of the European Patent Convention.
If the legal requirements are met, the patent must still be validated in the countries the patent seeker wishes to protect the invention. It might be possible that additional fees or translations might be asked from national patent offices. Therefore, an inventor must analyze in which countries protection is required, as there are several additional costs involved. A patent in Europe covers only the territory of one country and is generally valid for twenty years.
Several events could be regarded as the symptoms of anticommons. A few of those are patent thickets, patent warfare and patent trolls, although this does not constitute an exhaustive list. The question of how widespread these symptoms are depends on the countries and industries concerned. In this part of the paper, the author analyses the said concepts using a few examples from the USA. 2ff7e9595c
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