How many patents does Europe need?
FOSS Patents considers that staff of the EPO asks a good question: How many patents does Europe need?.The question was raised in the SUEPO flyer announcing the coming demonstration in front of the British Consulate.
"SUEPO's concern [about patent quality] is understandable in light of an official document (minutes of May 2009 of Board 28 meeting), which says that Mr Battistelli as well as the Chairman of the Administrative Council (AC) shared the following philosophy: "Priority on increased output should be the leading consideration.""
Florian Mueller considers that "the leaderhsip of a patent office, should, as a matter of principle, always view patent quality as the number one priority, with efficiency being a close second if there are objective indications of inefficiencies and a distant second if benchmarking and other types of analysis suggest that any further efficiency gains would be limited or, if overreaching, come at the expense of patent quality."
"One of the structural problems (which in turn is the root cause of other structural deficiencies) is that the EPO basically mints money for national patent offices by putting out many patents, and only by granting (not by rejecting) applications -- otherwise there's no money to be made for national patent offices."