Odp: [Patents] Dutch MP's demand triviality criteria in the law before allowing SW pats

[Luuk van Dijk Luuk.van.Dijk@xs4all.nl]

Jozef Halbersztadt wrote:
> 
> The present official EPO interpretion of non obviousness criteria (they are
> the most important) you will found at
> http://www.european-patent-office.org/legal/gui_lines/e/c_iv_9.htm
> 

Thanks for the useful pointer.

Reading it, it is obvious that the actual tresholds are vague and
in the mind of the attorney.  I don't think that that can be sharpened
in an enforceable way, which is why I think the system should be
changed such that the attorneys (or other people who are to provide
counter evidence to novelty claims) have an interest in trying very
hard to do so.  

(This is much like *real* science formulating hypotheses that
can be falsified, and intellectual integrity expects scientists to
try to disprove their own theories (I know that's only theory, and that
the practice of even real science leaves a bit to be desired here, but
the difference between pseudo and real science can often be clearly 
pointed out along these lines))

I think the failure of the present system is that the IP attorneys really
*want* to patent as much as possible, as a natural consequence of 
bureaucracies
wanting to expand their influence.  Therefore, these criteria, when left to
them, will not work.

So I was thinking along the lines of having criteria that said:
Its new and obvious if an interested party fails to prove the contrary,
rather than when a fictionally 'uninterested' party agrees that it is.

Weeks of work and amounts of money are difficult to measure (although not
as difficult as the 'amount of deep thinking') and are only indirect
measures of the obviousness.

Didn't Greg Ahoronian have plenty of ideas on how to make a better 
examiniation
proces?   We can stop arguing about the diff in swpats / hwpats now, because
it is no longer relevant (to the dutch case at least), and get on with making
a better patent system in the comforting thought that the explicit ban on
swpats  will be kept as a band-aid against the garbage patents.


Luuk