 |
|
CONTENT SYNDICATION 
|
|
CONTENT SYNDICATION
|
|
BLOGROLL OPML:
|
|
|
|
Search in IPJUR.COM
|
BLOG@IP::JURPatent Attorney Axel H Horns' Blog on Intellectual Property Law.
Monday, July 04, 2005Examples of Factual Misrepresentations by FFII.The FFII e.V. is used to have problems when it comes to correctly representing the facts on individual patents. Take, for example, today's posting European Patent Office Grants Intel Patent On Digital Video Recording on the FFII's Wiki website:Here are the claims of the newest innovative patent, granted on 29-06-2005:Wow! Such a trivial patent has been granted just last month by the European Patent Office? Scandalous! Err ... the truth is that FFII has simply quoted the original claims as filed with the application and published in Document EP 1254562 A2 referring to PCT Document WO 002001056270 A2 They have generated a PDF version of the granted patent EP 1254562 B1, and if any of their readers should ever bother to dig into this thing, claim 1 thereof as granted by the EPO reads much different: Why does FFII allow such misrepresentations? I don't know but the first thought might be that they are much better able to impress and shock the layman with such misleading language than with the much narrower claims actually granted by the EPO. And such misrepresentations are systematically done done on a methodical basis. On the above-mentioned Wiki page there are other links to "trivial patents". Let us pick for example the link to EP772327. If you click on the link you will get a page of the so-called Gauss system where the FFII maintaines a collection of patent-related databases and document heaps.On the web page you can see a lot of information related to EP 0772327 but with no indication visible so as to whether the laid-open Document EP 0772327 A2 reproducing the application as originally filed or the patent Document EP 0772327 B1 as granted by the EPO is actually quoted. But things get much more worse. Yes, also claims are quoted on that page. For example, claim 1: Of course and as expected, this is not claim 1 as granted. No surprise, the claim language as granted by the EPO is approximately three times as long as the text given by the FFII. The scope of the claim 1 as granted is tiny compated with the language given by the Gauss system. Feel free to look up the language of the claim 1 as granted e.g. by utilising Depatisnet.Digging into the Gauss system brings a lot more of such surprises. It is a common malpractice of the FFII and in particular of members of its supporter crowd to quote claim languages as originally filed or even abstract language when complaining the overbroad scope of so-called "trivial patents". I contine to say "don't spare the Patent Offices" should they ever have problems with quality control but the tactics of FFII and its supporter crowd to demonstrate bad patents is simply confidence tricksing or dupery. Many people do not know of the utmost important difference between laid-open Documents mirroring the wishes and desires of the applicant and granted patents documenting rights granted by the Authority. FFII is heinously exploiting this opportunity. I wonder why so many companies supporting FFII are not somewhat embarrassed by this practice.
It does sound like Gauss could be improved to show finally-granted texts as well as orginal-application texts. I don't know if there are good reasons why it is the way it is now (perhaps it is easier to find the original application than the final granted version?). Nevertheless, whilst I thank you for your clarifications on this point I would contend that the Intel patent in question is not much less scandalous or harmful in it's granted form than in its original broad form. It is still a ridiculously obvious and broad patent. It is also clearly pure software with no recognisable technical effect that would make it patentable under EPC 52. I am still confident that FFII is an honest organisation that fully represents the viewpoint of our company and thousands of others. If you would like to donate a bit of your expertise to improve the quality of the data in Guass, I'm sure that would be appreciated by everybody.
There is no real difficulty finding the text of granted European patents, and the granted claims are printed in French, English and German, so the granted patent is far more useful for people that don't have the language of the original application as their first language. However, for most normal patent searches on, say, Espacenet, the first thing a person will find will be the published application. This is the reason why FFII provides only the claims as originally published: most people conducting a quick search to check the facts will think that FFII are absolutely correct. The FFII clearly know what they are doing and are preying on the ignorance of others. As for the Intel patent. It is clearly technical under the body of case law that has been in place at the European Patent Office for the last 10 years (at least). The technical problem to be solved is that of synchronising content from two separate sources (a video source and a web source) for subsequent playback. There is therefore clearly an invention under Article 52 EPC as interpreted by EPO case law. From personal experience I am confident that it would also be considered patentable under UK law, so it's not just the EPO who would disagree with your understanding of the law. As for inventive step, well the solution to the technical problem seems largely to involve using timecodes to synchronise these two separate pieces of content. I do agree with you that that sounds like a pretty obvious solution to the problem I've set out. However, firstly, I'm guessing here as to the extent of the prior art and there could be something important that I've missed (eg the use of "packets" could be an important difference in some circumstances). Secondly, an inventive step does not have to lie in the solution, it may lie in the recognition of the problem: ie it is possible that nobody (before Intel) had tried to synchronise these two types of content before. If my hunch is right and this is something which nobody other than Intel is trying to do, then getting a patent granted for it isn't much of a problem, really. Preventing people from doing something that they weren't doing anyway is hardly going to bring the world to its knees! So where's the problem? Intel have a useless patent. Good for them! Of course, if you are aware of prior art that makes this invention obvious, then send it off to the EPO with your 1000 Euro opposition fee (or ask FFII to do it) and try to get the patent revoked. The EPO do make mistakes - in all fields of technology, not just in software - and the opposition procedure is put in place to allow people an opportunity to correct these mistakes. If FFII are just trying to stir up a fuss without actually doing anything about these patents that they think are invalid, then it makes them sound like a whining baby to me, rather than a pro-active organisation dedicated to ensuring that only good patents are granted. Compare FFII's attitude with Greenpeace, who regularly oppose biotech patents before the EPO and has had some degree of success in having additional limitations placed on "patents on life". Which organisation sounds the most grown up to you?
> From personal experience I am > confident that it would also be > considered patentable under UK law, > so it's not just the EPO who would > disagree with your understanding of > the law. Just to avoid any form of misunderstanding: In my original posting I dod not say that any of the patents as mentioned should not have been granted. In fact I did not even dig into them as deep as you did. I merely wrote "don't spare the Patent Offices" IF they should ever have problems with quality control. This would be a serious issue. But at the moment FFII deliberately mislead the general public to believe the Offices do have quality problems (by offering claims from A documents as if it were granted claims from B documents) where in fact they are working well.
The claims you get on http://gauss.ffii.org/PatentView/EP772327 are exactly the claims you get if you goto http://v3.espacenet.com/textclam?&DB=EPODOC&IDX=EP0772327 I find it intellectually dishonest to claim that Gauss should be are factually misrepresenting the patent claims, surely Espacenet is equally guilty of that offence. So I suggest that you direct your complaint towards Espacenet, and ask them to publish the B1 claims as soon as a patent is granted. At the same time I suggest that you ask espacenet to clearly designate on the page if they are displaying an A1/A2/B1 document. If you have a constructive suggestion of how to obtain text versions of the claims of all, the granted patents in the Gauss database (~43000), then I would be happy to supply this information. (ascii is necessary for search, display, and filtering) However since most are documents are only available as scanned PDFs from the paper documents, this is not feasable. Again try to suggest solutions to this problem, rather than bitching about us not having solved it. Currenly, you can follow the bibliographic link in the bottom of a page to espacenet, and click on the B1 PDF file there. This is the best solution given Espacenets current limitations. -- Mvh. Carsten Svaneborg http://gauss.ffii.org
I have now added a note to all claims of granted patents, saying that the granted claims might differ from those shown on Gauss. Secondly, Gauss does not make any claims wrt. if a given patent is trivial or not. Our goal is to find all software patents, i.e. patents that can be infringed by running software on a computer. Some of these will even be legitimate inventions, while others are software as such, i.e. they can be infringed simply by running software on a PC. We are currently attempting to make a sensible classification to illustrate which patents EPO has granted on "pure software". A first and rough attempt at this can be seen at http://gauss.ffii.org/Browse/Domain -- Mvh. Carsten Svaneborg http://gauss.ffii.org  Post a Comment
| ||||||||||||||||
