Entries by Axel H Horns

In an earlier posting I had reported that, on the first day of the Belgian EU Presidency, the EU Commission had published a Proposal for a Council Regulation (EU) on the translation arrangements for the European Union patent. This Document suggests to require human quality translations of EU patents only in case of a dispute. Otherwise, machine translations are deemed to be sufficient for informing the general public.

On September 03, 2010, the General Secretariat of the EU Council has published Document 13166/10 titled Proposal for a Council Regulation (EU) on the translation arrangements for the European Union patent - Background note on machine translations. The paper is addressed to Working Party on Intellectual Property (Patents). In particular, it conveys in its Annex a background note on machine translations for the EU Patent, drawn up by the Commission services, as a basis for discussions at the meeting of the Working Party on Intellectual Property (Patents) on September 08 and 09, 2010.

Only now I have stumbled upon Opinion 01/09 - Statement by the Advocates General of the Court of Justice of the European Union concerning the European Patent and the Community Patent Court as planned by the EU Council; see my earlier postings here, there and there. The date on that Document (Original in French only) is July 2, 2010; however, the Opinion was not published on the Official website of the Court of Justice of the European Union (formerly known as European Court of Justice, or ECJ for short). A link to the French version was posted on August 19, 2010, on EPLAW Patent Blog.

I won't understand those childish games played by interested circles inside of and close to the EU Council in a futile attempt to withhold such important documents from the eyes of the general public.

Anyway, what the Advocates General have to say to the proposal submitted by the EU Council last year is highly relevant:

A first snippet from the Document makes clear that the Advocates General are not opposed to the general layout of the proposed Patents Court (PC) to resolve certain classes of disputes between individuals:

"61. We should first examine whether the European Union judicial system, as resulting from the treaties, prohibits assigning to the future PC sole competence to hear certain disputes between individuals in the Community patent field.

62. The Advocates-General do not believe that that is the case."

The bombshell, however, appears a bit later in the Document:

The ninth round of negotiations on the proposed Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) was held in Lucerne, Switzerland, from June 28 to July 01, 2010. After the eighth round of negotiations on ACTA held in Wellington, New Zealand, from April 12 to April 16, 2010, a redacted version of the draft version had been published but obviously there was no intention to keep the negotiation process transparent in general. Secrecy prevailed as usual. It needed another leak in order to keep the general public informed.

As it was to be expected, this much anticipated breach of confidentiality has happened; a copy of the consolidated text dated July 01, 2010, appeared on the Internet. A transcribed text version can be found here. The document apparently comes from the Civil Liberties Committee (LIBE) of the European Parliament.

There are myths about patents on computer-implemented inventions a.k.a. software patents which won't ever die.

One of them is the allegation that patents are a tool to steal a software developer / programmer the hard-earned fruits of labor. The software is the developer's / programmer's own work and he or she should be entitled to some sort of ownership.

But there are those evil and pesky patent owners, all of a sudden jumping out of the bushes, armed with a patent certificate comprising a long list of patent claims, demanding to cease and desist commercially using the poor developer's / programmer's software on the grounds of patent infringement. Despite the fact that the software developer / programmer has not only conceived the algorithm for the software by himself or herself but also written every line of code without cheating or copying, the patent owner threatens to prevent him or her enjoying the fruit of this ownership. Patent critics like to construe this scenario as some sort of forced dispossession.

Some months ago I had contemplated going deeper into technologies and issues of e-books and mobile e-book readers. Starting point was some kind of discontent with the format of a blog for articles that exceed some threshold of length comfortable to be consumed on a normal desktop or notebook screen. Would it make sense to create from time to time an article with more length than appropriate for a blog and then disseminating it on-line as an e-book?

An on-line search session aiming at free authoring tools for use under Linux lead me to two software packages:

EPO Financing Trends (Source: Document CA/33/10)

On the website of the EPO Staff Union (SUEPO) a number of relevant Documents from the Administrative Council of the European Patent Organisation (EPOrg) running the European Patent Office have appeared:

• Document CA/39/10 dated 2010-02-23: Fee Reform and Sustainable Financing - Document 1: "Support for evidence based policy"
• Document CA/33/10 dated 2010-05-20: Fee Reform and Sustainable Financing - Document 2: "Cost-coverage, yes, but not everywhere"
• Document CA/36/10 dated 2010-05-20: Fee Reform and Sustainable Financing - Document 4: 'Continue enhancing certainty in the patenting process'
• Document CA/38/10 dated 2010-02-26: Fee Reform and Sustainable Financing - Document 6: 'Predictability of national renewal fee policies'
• Document CA/82/10 dated 2010-05-18: Fee Reform and Sustainable Financing - Timetable
• Document CA/91/10 dated 2010-06-09: Summary of the Study on the Economic Dimensions of the Fee Structure in the European Patent System

Today, the European Court of Justice (former ECJ) has published the decision in Case C-428/08, reference for a preliminary ruling under Article 234 EC from the Rechtbank's-Gravenhage (Netherlands), made by decision of 24 September 2008, received at the Court on 29 September 2008, in the proceedings

Monsanto Technology LLC

v

Cefetra BV, Cefetra Feed Service BV, Cefetra Futures BV, Alfred C. Toepfer International GmbH,

Intervener in support of the defendant: Argentine State:

1. Article 9 of Directive 98/44/EC of the European Parliament and of the Council of 6 July 1998 on the legal protection of biotechnological inventions is to be interpreted as not conferring patent right protection in circumstances such as those of the case in the main proceedings, in which the patented product is contained in the soy meal, where it does not perform the function for which it is patented, but did perform that function previously in the soy plant, of which the meal is a processed product, or would possibly again be able to perform that function after it had been extracted from the soy meal and inserted into the cell of a living organism.
2. Article 9 of the Directive effects an exhaustive harmonisation of the protection it confers, with the result that it precludes the national patent legislation from offering absolute protection to the patented product as such, regardless of whether it performs its function in the material containing it.
3. Article 9 of the Directive precludes the holder of a patent issued prior to the adoption of that directive from relying on the absolute protection for the patented product accorded to it under the national legislation then applicable.
4. Articles 27 and 30 of the Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights, constituting Annex 1C to the Agreement establishing the World Trade Organisation (WTO), signed at Marrakesh on 15 April 1994 and approved by Council Decision 94/800/EC of 22 December 1994 concerning the conclusion on behalf of the European Community, as regards matters within its competence, of the agreements reached in the Uruguay Round multilateral negotiations (1986-1994) do not affect the interpretation given of Article 9 of the Directive.