[Patents] New WIPO drive for unlimited patentability and limits on patent quality

[phm@a2e.de (PILCH Hartmut)]

> > According to our view, any harmonisations of the patent systems should
> > not take the form of binding treaties but only of voluntary consent
> > papers and memoranda of understanding between patent administrations.
>
> I agree with you with the rest, but I think that harmonisation would
> be good if it were done in the right direction. Of course, the purpose
> of this attempt of harmonization is to make more and more difficult to
> make any reform of the patent system.

The basic problem with international treaties is that they are hard to
change.  Even if the direction was good now, it might no longer be
adequate in a few years.  This is less of a problem with copyright,
because that needs only a few rules.  The patent system needs a whole
bureaucracy, which by itself is already inert and subject to normal
bureaucratic decay processes.  Moreover, in order to function, such a
complex system would really need a high degree of mobility/reformability,
much more so than copyright.

On the other hand, the patent offices are quite good at serving their
major clients' wishes.  Even without supporting legislation or binding
treaties, software and logical ideas became patentable all over the world,
with the same type of function claims and almost the same wording
pervasive everywhere.

The real obstacle to harmonisation lies in fact in having too many legal
rules at all levels.  If only the basic tenets were effectively regulated
in law and the rest was in some guidelines, then these guidelines would
very soon be very similar everywhere.  Moreover, if the examination
system could be scrapped altogether and replaced by a system of public
claim refutal competition, the bureaucracy would go away and with it most
of the rules that now need to be "harmonized".

So in effect what the patent offices are doing is not "harmonisation" but
the opposite:  erecting lots of legal rules, national and international,
to protect themselves against possible reform wishes of their sovereign
and thereby, in effect, make harmonisation difficult.

-phm