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| | Message text That's the difference between the USPTO system and the EPO one...
US: you grant everything, providing it is new, and let a judge decide whether the patent is worthy when someone complains.
In the basic principle, the inventor will pay his patent fees to the US gov until someone complains. Then one will have to go to court (and pay for that too) to get it revoked.
Why this ? The USPTO is understaffed and an examiner is not given enough resources to do a thorough search (find prior art) and examination (check that the patent respects the conventions). Therefore, in order to get rid of the backlog, a lot is granted which should not be.
Europe: the EPO is something like 3x bigger than the USPTO. An examiner is given about 2x the time to treat a patent application. The enforcement of the PCT (Patent Cooperation treaty) and EPC (European Patent Convention) is therefore much stricter: it is very rare that the EPO let an undue "software" patent (but also BioTech or in other technical fields) go through. The higher quality of the search and examination of patents in the EPO is known around the world, and that's also why about 60% of the PCT applications (patents aimed for a publication around the world) are dealt there.
Added to that, once a patent is granted (rmk, everything is made public by the EPO through http://www.espacenet.com the public has 9 month to react and contest the novelty/inventiveness of the patent directly at the EPO (this is called opposition). This is done at a much lower cost and faster than in a court.
Also, if you want to act in a preemptive way, all patent applications are published 8made public) 18 months after their filing. You can then, for free, submit prior art to the EPO that will show the non novelty or the obviousness of the application, so that the grant should even not occur.
Thus, even if the EPO makes a mistake, there are ways for correcting it as fast as possible with low costs.
But you still see all these websites/banners against software patents, but also bio-ethic patents, etc. from people who do not know about patents in general, or the real industrial WORLD.
And the silly thing about it is that everybody is complaining about the US way of dealing with patents, although the EPO has been doing its work just fine for about 30 years now 
So it may be true that you may not develop something in the US because of a silly patent granted there, that you cannot afford contesting in a US court. So be it, we'll have it in "Old Europe" anyway, that's for the country promoting innovation, etc. as seen in some other post (no offence meant)  |
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