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Unified Patent Court is more expensive and an SME killer
- civilized 5y agoAnnoying that politicians feel entitled to set enormous fees for government services as a form of social engineering or profiteering, rather than simply providing the services at cost.
- patentatt 5y agoLuckily the UPC is a complete pipe dream and may never see the light of day. It’s been ‘around the corner’ for nearly a decade.
- zoobab 5y agoThey are now very close to get it running, they want to organise a signing ceremony of a patch for the Brexit issue, without any debate in the Parliament(s): http://patentblog.kluweriplaw.com/2021/10/28/member-states-will-sign-declaration-to-clear-way-for-preparatory-phase-unified-patent-court/ http://patentblog.kluweriplaw.com/2021/10/28/member-states-w...
- etothepii 5y agoIt's not clear from this press release that there's a fee to defend oneself. A 11k fee to file would surely make it less likely there would be trolls?
- newaccount74 5y agoIf someone attacks you with a bogus patent, then it would cost 20.000€ to request invalidation of the bogus patent. From a quote near the bottom of the article: > Typically, in response the sued company could be advised to demand cancellation of the Unitary Patent by means of a counterclaim but in that case, it will be required to pay a court fee of EUR 20,000.
- stepbeek 5y ago11k is nothing to a patent troll like a FAANG (MAANG now?) but quite a lot to the kind of SME that - afaik - doesn’t engage in this behavior to the same extent.
- ByteJockey 5y ago> MAANG now? I keep hearing MANGA
- stepbeek 5y agoIf we substitute Netflix for Microsoft (I’m never sure why Netflix was chosen instead), we can have GAMMA which is my personal favorite.
- ectopod 5y agoWhy not have both? "The GAMMAN companies" has a nice ring to it.
- fortran77 5y agoI think it was originally for "Silicon Valley" companies, and Microsoft was up in Seattle.
- dlgeek 5y agoSo's Amazon. It was "high-growth large-cap tech stocks" at a specific point (where MSFT was flat) - it was a Wall Street thing, not a tech thing.
- PeterisP 5y ago> (MAANG now?) FAANG still has G for Google, not A for Alphabet. In a similar vein, we can (and perhaps should?) simply ignore Facebook's rebranding attempt - names are a social constrict, you don't get to unilaterally decide how others will call you.
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- gruturo 5y agoTrolls have a reasonably large amount of money to burn if necessary, and they normally try to get their victims to settle before things reach any court. So no, this won't stop trolls, it will only deter a lot of legitimate cases from SMEs.
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- JackFr 5y agoWhat is an SME? Subject matter expert? Small and medium enterprise? Article could do better.
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- wereHamster 5y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Small_and_medium-sized_enterprises https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Small_and_medium-sized_enterpr...
- uberswe 5y agoSmall to medium Enterprise (business)
- whoopdedo 5y agoI've come to believe there's a rule similar to Betteridge's Law of Headlines along the lines of: When an article says "small-business" it can be substituted with "big-business" to make the article more accurate. Except in rare cases, policies that help smaller businesses will also help larger ones proportionally. To hide the big-business benefit, promoters of the bill will spotlight how it helps the "little guy". Because SME/SMB have become politically untouchable. Being accused of hurting small business owners will get a congressperson out of a job. It's a think-of-the-children argument. So when I see something being touted as good for small business business, it sets off warnings that a spin doctor is at work.
- zoobab 5y agoCourt fee to invalidate a patent in Belgium is 165EUR, Netherlands 667EUR, France around 400EUR, Italy around 500EUR, Czech Republic 80EUR, Sweden 160EUR. We are very far from those 20.000EUR.
- _0ffh 5y ago> FFII says the proposed Unified Patent Court is an SME killer with its super-expensive court fees of 20.000EUR. No small company will be able to defend itself if it is accused of violating a patent, the proposed UPC court fees will deny access to justice for small companies, the cost being 100X more expensive than the current situation in the different countries. I can't help but wonder if this is really just an honest mistake by the EU.
- brezelgoring 5y ago>just an honest mistake I wouldn't think so, these are legislations that have every word and number fought for by the legislators, this is likely a concession to some legislator that stands to gain from this.
- jopsen 5y ago> I can't help but wonder if this is really just an honest mistake by the EU. Unlike software patents, it's less clear to me that this is worse than the alternative.
- nceqs3 5y agoThe EU patent office is horribly unfair to individual inventors. There are not even fee differences for a kid in their bedroom vs Apple when filing a patent. Take data also, EPO will charge you hundreds of thousands of dollars for patent data. USPTO gives it to everybody for free.
- iechoz6H 5y ago"Take data also, EPO will charge you hundreds of thousands of dollars for patent data." This appears to be wrong, the full dataset is available as a free download: https://data.epo.org/linked-data/download/ https://data.epo.org/linked-data/download/ There is also a freely available API, with documentation at: https://data.epo.org/linked-data/documentation/api-overview.html https://data.epo.org/linked-data/documentation/api-overview....
- nceqs3 5y agoI am not talking about the patent images. That's not the data that most people are interested in. I am talking about ESpacenet, OPS, etc. which are the ones that people care about.
- iechoz6H 5y agoOPS data can be downloaded with a free account (up to 4GB per week): https://www.epo.org/searching-for-patents/data/web-services/ops.html https://www.epo.org/searching-for-patents/data/web-services/... ESpacenet appears to be available as at the very least a completely free online search: https://worldwide.espacenet.com/patent/ https://worldwide.espacenet.com/patent/ Am I missing something?
- nceqs3 5y ago4GB is nothing for a dataset of that size and Espacenet is certainly available online, but it is heavily rate limited and they do not just allow you to download the full thing. The data was only a side point. My main frustration with the EPO is the fee structure.
- pclmulqdq 5y agoThe 20k and 11k fees here are for invalidating and proving infringement respectively. The second one should dissuade trolls who want to target small users. The 20k fee is not to defend yourself from an infringement claim, it is to invalidate a patent. That is very different than defending yourself. The equivalent filing in the US is about the same price, and the process of invalidating a patent is long and complicated, so in any jurisdiction you should expect to pay hundreds of thousands in legal fees for that process. On top of those fees, 20k isn't that much.
- rwmj 5y agoShouldn't invalidation of a patent simply be a matter of presenting evidence of prior art? I can imagine that you'd want to mandate that the evidence is presented in a certain format and possibly charge a very nominal fee (both to avoid time-wasters) but nothing more. The bias should always be towards invalidating patents, given the damage they do to competition.
- pclmulqdq 5y agoThere are a lot of different ways of invalidating a patent, and that is the simplest. However, that is also nominally what the examiner did during the issuance of the patent, so unless there was gross incompetence (eg the "shopping cart" patents), it's not that simple.
- rwmj 5y agoI've filed several patents and never seen any evidence that the examiner did anything apart from stamping paperwork.
- btrettel 5y agoType the application number into Global Dossier if it's published, and take a look at the "file wrapper" (term for all the documents listed). You'll get a better idea of what the examiner did. https://globaldossier.uspto.gov/ https://globaldossier.uspto.gov/ In the US at least, they typically put time stamped search logs in the patent file wrapper, so you can get a fairly good idea of what was searched and how long that took. It seems to me, however, that few patent attorneys will look at anything other than the "office actions", and they will look only at parts of those. Other jurisdictions don't seem to put anywhere near as many documents in patent file wrappers as the US does.
- mannykannot 5y agoThis is a problematic proposal, but, unfortunately perhaps, I do not think one can plausibly say that it raises the specter of "EU economic suicide". I would characterize it more along the lines of being a step in the refeudalization of the developed world.
- mark_l_watson 5y agoI think this bias against small companies and individuals is easily explained, at least in the USA where I live. This probably applies to the EU also: Large corporations buy influence via lobbying, revolving door policies, etc. so expect governments to set in place policies to protect large incumbents from smaller rivals. So many modern problems would be reduced if we could get rid of the deep systemic corruption.
- mchusma 5y agoNot sure what to make of this. Patents should be much more expensive. They are government granted monopolies. Most patents are also not really original too, so I'd expect the world would be better off with 1/10th the number of patents. They probably should ongoing gradually escalating fees (for example maybe getting a patent for the first 5 years can be $100k, next 5 years $1M, next 5 years $10M, last 5 years $100M). But the fees for resolving disputes should come down (mostly lawyers fees, not court fees). Probably the best way is to eliminate the government granted Monopoly on attorneys (and related restrictions on law).
- emn13 5y agoAll of these suggestions are a right step. The fundamental issue is that the current system is designed to issue when in doubt; without considering the cost to society from inhibiting progress by pointlessly throwing everything through the legal grinder with extra sand (in the form of a patent minefield). Ideally we'd start looking for an entirely different way to encourage innovation, and just cease issuing patents entirely. For example, patent-like systems with a more restrictive scope (not exlusive access to pretty much "any idea", but exclusive access to e.g. "medical approval"), so we don't accidentally hit every future sector with this junk. And perhaps we'd look for some system that's more self-regulating; i.e. where abuse exists rather in the form of ripping of the taxpayer, and less in the form of court cases. The justice system is so terribly inefficient and everything it touches, yet is just keeps on growing until everything is some kind of zero-sum game.
- ATsch 5y agoIf there's one thing I've learned from the world of think tanks it's that you have to be extremely critical when someone starts arguing about the woes of SMEs.