While we drift in the lull of the new term of the United States Supreme Court, waiting to learn if at least one branch of the federal government has come to its senses about patent law, let’s cast a wary eye across the Atlantic to see what mischief the European Commission has wrought. The Commission, or at least some of its members, have been busy little beavers, albeit more pests than nifty engineers.
First is the European Patent Litigation Agreement, or EPLA, (http://patlaw-reform.european-patent-office.org/epla/) being advanced by DG Internal Markets (DGIM) and its pro-patent commissioner, Charlie McCreevy of Ireland. The essence of EPLA is to create a single court for patent litigation along the lines of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit (CAFC). (Your remember the CAFC. It’s the court that gave us software patents, business method patents, reduced obviousness, and mandatory injunctions, just to name a few of the more prominent exercises of the body’s judicial activism in the field of patent law.) Now the European Commission wants to make this same mistake. Critics of the EPLA, including yours truly, view it as merely a back door to establishing software patents across the European landscape, since it would become the enforcement vehicle for the European Patent Office (EPO). Yes, the EPO is the same body that continues to ignore its own charter and grants software patents.
Next is IPRED, the proposed directive on criminal measures aimed at ensuring the enforcement of…
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