Via IFOSSLR and SpicyIP I’ve been informed about the Peer-to-Patent system, in which patents are quality checked by peer review. especially since the Commission has been stressing the need for higher quality patents since 2008. In an industrial policy that is far from enlightened with respects to the benefit of sharing results of research in a non-commercial way, I might add (sadly, that is also completely compliant with this report from eutechnologytransfer.eu which explicitly refers to ”technology transfer” as something happening between public research institutions and private enterprises, contrary to the common usage of the term which is making accessible technology to public institutions that dont yet have access).
I’m wondering if the Peer-to-Patent system is something that could, or should, be discussed in relations to these and these recent EU proposals on Community Patents (they’re an old debate: basically the EU has been wanting pan-European patents since the 1960s but were pre-empted by the European Patent Convention, and now because of translation costs they’ve been on hold since the 1980s BUT because of the London Agreement perhaps they can be avoided). I didn’t have the time to read the most recent proposals on Community Patents yet but have had them briefed to me a couple of times.
Another report I didn’t have the time to read is a report on IPR and SMEs. There’s several ranging from ”SMEs need to be taught how to patent” to ”SMEs can’t enforce the IPR they do have” linked in the footnotes of some of the above-mentioned documents. I keep feeling they should have something to do with the IPR Observatory, but technically the problem addressed by Christian Engström with the constant mingling of copyright infringement and other types of IPR violations is a bummer. What irks me is that Charles McGreevy’s directorate-general manages to mix in copyright violations in a document stated explicitly not to contain copyright analyses.
Well, well. euwiki.org remains a good workspace for EU legislation and campaigns. This is the template for the Observatory work.