Ms Alison Brimelow, President of EPO, On EPO's Success Story And Why The Office Needs To Adapt To A Moving Landscape.
"[...] I have a consistent theme, which is that huge backlogs change the nature of the patenting system and create ambiguities which can be exploited in ways unforeseen by those who established the patent system. This is moving us away from the classic justification of the system. If you spend several years waiting for a decision, you and others can play 'rich man's poker', taking a bet on what your rights are going to be and discussing your commercial relationships in the shadow of that pending set of applications. I use the phrase 'rich man's poker' very deliberately as this is a game much better suited to companies with long pockets than to the small. This means that SMEs have an additional struggle in terms of effectively deploying the fruits of their innovation.
That worries me a lot, and I have spoken about it in public. I am not clear that we will ever get ourselves back to the position that can be regarded as 'healthy balance'. I think that the effect of backlogs in the use of intellectual property is probably irreversible, and that raises big questions for world patent offices.
More generally, there is the theme of quality and fitness-for-purpose of the patent system. I am very struck that people who are engaged with that system closely recognise that this high volume game is not particularly comfortable nor economically effective when viewed from the perspective of the public good. There is a set of assumptions about the direction in which we need to go which is simply not matched by the rhetoric that we need more patents in Europe. What we need are more good patents and possibly fewer patents overall. Look at how long patent life is these days: it's declining.
Look at rates of abandonment: what comes in the door in no way matches what lives for 20 years. That is a significant operating challenge for us.
'Less is more' is very important, and we need to make sure that the patents that we grant are highly relevant, not marginal, and have a real utility, as opposed to being a sort of currency for the 'rich man's poker' game. [...]"
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Patents