IP Politics

These days in Germany headlines of mainstream media are announcing the liquidation of the mail order retailer Quelle located in Nuremberg. Some 4.000 jobs will be lost. The holding of the group of companies to which Quelle belongs, Arcandor AG, had filed for bankruptcy in June this year, and since then no investor could be lured into acquiring Quelle GmbH. Readers of this Blog sitting abroad might not be impressed by such news but in Germany Quelle had been one of the major flagships of the so-called 'Wirtschaftswunder' years in Germany during the 50s of the 20^th century. Virtually everybody in Germany beyond a certain age knows this Quelle brand, and in earlier times millions of printed mail order catalogues have been distributed year by year.

And now it went bust. So what? It is business as usual that businesses sometimes fail. A quite disturbing aspect of this matter is, however, that at the same time where Quelle is forced to close, Amazon.com is flourishing, and news just came in that eBay.com has increased profits, both companies founded and seated in the United States. Surely there still is a huge market for distant selling. Didn't Quelle have a website? Yes, of course, they had one. You even could order items via the Internet. But their business model was still centered around that 20^th century printed mail order catalogue. The website was merely thought of as an auxiliary distribution channel, and this doctrine was proved to be fatal.

Now switching to something different. News are emerging that the new centre-right Government in Germany might be inclined to help newspaper companies and book publishers suffering from diminishing cash flow by creating a new sort of auxiliary copyright ('Leistungsschutzrecht' in German). No details are available (see reports [in German, sorry] here and there) but the central idea might perhaps be to have a licenceable right for the owner of a website to aggregate news like Google does it. Maybe that in a few years time you will not be allowed to link to a German website without having obtained written consent by the website owner and, in some cases, also paid some licence fees.

Mr Joff Wild recently wrote in his IAM Blog an interesting and thought-provoking article under the headline 'It is time to tackle Europe's patent attorney deficit':

"The European Union currently has a population of just about bang on 500 million. These people live in 27 member states. Within these member states, there are over 20 million businesses. Big numbers, I am sure you will agree.

Now one of the stated aims of the European Union is to be the centre of the world's knowledge economy. That means creating and nurturing the innovative skills of the 500 million so that we can grow the 20 million. This should lead to more jobs, greater prosperity and higher standards of living. Most readers of this blog will agree that in order to create and nurture innovation - and certainly in order to turn it into something practical, scalable and sellable - the patent system has a crucial role to play.

We all know about the on-going efforts to introduce a Community patent and a single patent court for the EU. But I wonder whether these are really the pressing issues everyone thinks they are. I say this having just found out how many patent attorneys there are currently authorised to prosecute applications at the EPO: 9,250. That's right - nine thousand two hundred and fifty. Out of a total population of 500 million. When you bear in mind that over half of all European patent attorneys, 4,956 to be precise, are based in either the UK or Germany (there are, for example, more EPAs in Munich than there are in the whole of France; and more in London than there are in all of Italy and Spain combined), then that number becomes even more frightening.

If Europe really is going to be at the heart of the 21st century's innovation economy, can we really do it on the back of the efforts of under 10,000 patent attorneys? I just can't see how. Not because there will be a shortfall in the number of people able to prosecute patents at the EPO, but because it is not possible to rely on just 10,000 people to give the accurate, patent-related business advice innovative European companies are going to need if they are to manage and exploit their IP rights to maximum effect. Remember, too, that at any one time a good number of that 10,000 is not going to be practising or will be working inside corporations and so not in a position to represent anyone but their employees. [...]"

Well, such language is music in the ears of European patent attorneys ... But let's get serious: Are those statistical considerations of Mr Wild really valid?

As a supplement to my earlier posting: I think I should report that recent polls undertaken by infratest/dimap suggest that meanwhile the German Piratenpartei appears to be at approximately 3%. In mid-August the polls had indicated that 2% might be a realistic figure. There are still two and a half weeks to go until the next general election to the German Bundestag on September 27, 2009. The quorum for obtaining seats is at 5%. It would resemble a major political earthquake if the Piratenpartei get over that hurdle. The German Piratenpartei stands for abolishing patents on biotechnical inventions as well as on computer-implemented inventions.

Mr Lessig's discussion of Google Books (Cambridge, MA, July 31, 2009, talk at the Berkman workshop on the Google book search settlement) appears to be spot on whereas some contributions of the German Government to the debate on EU level suggest that they did not get the point (Documents 10221/09 and 9285/09).

Video clip licence:

On this Blog I repeatedly had reported on the rise of the German Piratenpartei (see especially here and there). This party causes concerns, if not headaches, for many people working in the field of Intellectual Property as one of their constitutional cornerstones appears to be a critical or even hostile attitude towards this field of law. The Swedish counterpart Piratpartiet have positioned themselves as plain patent abolitionists.

However, their German counterpart appears to be somewhat more moderate: They are demanding modifications of Copyright law plus a sectoral abolishment of patents in the fields of software and biotechnology. This does of course not mean that such sectoral abolitionism might be acceptable for anyone working with these instruments. But it should be well noted that the German branch of the Pirate movement have chosen other starting points than their Swedish counterpart.

Concerning the recent elections to the European Parliament, Piratenpartei had ended up at approximately 0.9%. On September 27, 2009, there will be general elections held in Germany, and weekly polls show how the various political parties stand in the voter's favour. Recently Handelsblatt have published a poll result as follows:

According to a recent report on IP Watch, the latest round of negotiations for an Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) held in Rabat, Morocco on July 16 to 17, 2009, resulted in the announcement that after closed-door discussions on transparency, the only agreement reached on transparency was to release draft agendas of future closed-door negotiating rounds. The next round of negotiations will be hosted by Korea in November 2009, and the intention is still to conclude the agreement 'as soon as possible in 2010', according to the Office of the US Trade Representative (USTR).

Those were the times where business owners proudly advertised their use of the patent system (Photo above: Patent House, Fawe Street, London. Located in Poplar, East London, is the former factory site of dog-food pioneer James Spratt, built in 1899. (C) 2008 by jordi.martorell, available via Flickr and licenced under a CC Licence)

Today, the Intellectual Property (IP) community has a real and big problem, indeed. Whilst the IP business, in particular in the field of patents, has soared for decades, the perception of this entire region of law by the general public as well as by the political class gets worse and worse. Still more worrying, relatively little attention was paid by IP professionals to this ever widening gap as it seems. But recently Mr Joff Wild announced in his IAM Blog that the coming print issue of the magazine will be devoted to looking at the spread of anti-IP sentiment in many parts of the world and how the IP community should go about tackling this. Joff also stresses the need to do some IP Brand development work. Well, we shall wait and see.