Back to the articleEPO isn't the ultimate anything #
Posted Wednesday 29th October 2008 11:44 GMT
"The European Patent Office (EPO) has asked its ultimate legal authority to look at the European Patent Convention (EPC) and issue advice on the patentability of software. The EPO said that such advice was necessary to ensure the uniform application of the EPC."
It's just an organisation set up under a treaty to issue patents. That treaty forbade software for computers, but they wanted to patent it anyway so played games with the term 'as such' to issue patents for software. This was wrong.
They pretended the trade treaty required that they misinterpret the patent treaty. This was wrong.
i.e. The Nations are in charge and EPO is required to abide by the treaty they wrote. If the EPO wants to depart from that it needs the Nations to change the treaty.
The European Patent Court likewise is just a body under the EPO with pretensions of legal status that it doesn't really have. It is not the ultimate anything, it is under the EPO and as such has even less real power.
The National Courts rule, not the EPO. So the EPO's opinion, which has been ruled faulty repeatedly in many courts, has no more weight than it did the last time they wanted to pretend 'As such' meant software could be patented.
Use trade secrets if you want to protect your software, they work, they're worldwide and they are instantaneously granted.
The only reason to use patents when trade secrets are better is if you are a major company with declining share, and worried about new entrants to your market with their Android and Jesus products.
But protectionism is ultimately self defeating Nokia.
