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

[PILCH Hartmut <phm@a2e.de>]

> 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.

More about this is of course found at

        http://swpat.ffii.org/players/uk/

and if you add

        http://swpat.ffii.org/players/us/

the UK-US alliance against the continent in promotion of unlimited
patentability is indeed striking.

-- 
Hartmut Pilch, FFII & Eurolinux Alliance              tel. +49-89-12789608
Protecting Innovation against Patent Inflation       http://swpat.ffii.org/
140,000 signatures against software patents      http://www.noepatents.org/