Re: [Patents] Some gossip on the EPO Presidential election (fwd)

[PILCH Hartmut <phm@a2e.de>]

> not only does the UK have links to the Bush administration, but we also
> have the vast majority of 'illegal' swpats in europe, and the people who
> have advised on how to get around art. 52.....

UK companies have only about 1,300 of >30,000 swpats at the EPO, less
than DE, which have about 2000, but more than FR.  But it is clear that
the UK has been instrumental in pushing for unlimited patentability
ever since the Diplomatic Conference of 1973, when it was the UK
delegation that made fuss about the exclusions in Art 52(2), suggesting
that they would be over-extended, and thus prompted the "as such"
clause in Art 52(3), and since they put Art 52 into their Patents Act
of 1977 with a semantic glide that obliterates the invention concept.
This obliteration has then become a British tradition which leads
directly to to the Greenbook of 1998 and to the McCarthy report, which
even has an amendment stipulating that "invention" has a double sense.
All along the way, the UKPO has been active and influential in pushing
their line.  The glide at the EPO in 1986 is said by knowledgable people
inside the EPO to have been due to british pushing.

This should of course be a reason to reject Brimelow as an EPO president
and prefer a EU politician such as Karel Van Miert, who comes from the
outside of the patent system.  Yet I don't really know what the result of
either nomination would be.  If the candidate is not really strong
personality with a will to make the EPO serve the public, then any
candidate is probably the same: he/she will be run by the apparatus which
he/she is supposed to run.

> PILCH Hartmut wrote:
> > Indeed this later appeared on GregNews.
> >
> > ---------- Forwarded message ----------
> > Date: Tue, 25 Mar 2003 12:05:21 -0500 (EST)
> > From: Gregory Aharonian <srctran@world.std.com>
> > To: epo@mlist.austria.eu.net
> > Subject: Some gossip on the EPO Presidential election
> >
> >
> > Attached is some gossip on the EPO presidential election which will be
> > tomorrow's PATNEWS.  Some more gossip about the election would be nice
> > to have.
> >
> > Greg Aharonian
> > Internet Patent News Service
> > patnews@patenting-art.com
> >
> >                               ====================
> >
> > Greg,
> >     Greetings from Amsterdam.  I thought you would be interested
> > in the latest rumors about the election of the next president of the
> > European Patent Office.  Last Thursday, on the 20th, the Administrative
> > Council of EPO tried electing a new EPO President to replace Ingo Korber.
> > To be elected, a candidate needs a three-quarters majority vote, but the
> > leading contender, Alison Brimelow (who is the current CEO of the UK
> > Patent Office), only received two-thirds of the vote.  So on June 9th,
> > there will be another vote.  Nominations close by May 8th (sorry, the
> > candidate has to be European, otherwise some of us would be glad to
> > nominate you!).
> >
> >     Industry executives and their lawyers are pushing hard for Brimelow
> > to be elected president, as she is the only candidate with a deep 
> > knowledge
> > of intellectual property, experience of running (and improving) a Patent
> > Office and fighting for maximum benefits for the staff, and fluency all
> > three EPO languages.  Personally, I think there is a bit of international
> > politics here, in light of the British government's alliance with the
> > European-insulting Bush Administration.
> >
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> >
> >
>
>
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