One of the goals of this blog (besides being fun to me) is to provide practitioners or amateurs of European patent law with some daily exercise to stay in touch with the actual interpretation and application of this law and related principles by the Boards of appeal of the EPO.There are several reasons that have contributed to the creation of this blog.
I read lots of case law, partly because doing so allows me to stay up-to-date in European patent law, and also because it intellectually enriches my patent practice. I also tend to believe that whatever you do for yourself only is a sort of waste of time. Why not make others benefit from what I find?
If this was the only reason, I could have become a more regular contributor to Laurent Teyssèdre’s blog. However, this great blog is published in French and, therefore, not so easy to access for persons whose command of French is not so good (although machine translation is available). More generally, I find that the distribution of EPC resources in Europe is quite uneven (not to say unfair) and that the French are very rich in European patent stuff (we have the CEIPI, the EQE preprep, the ASPI courses, Laurent’s blog, VW (Vigand&Weiss), and much more) whereas in quite a few contracting states, EQE candidates have little if any help. Therefore, I decided to launch a blog in English, so as to be within the reach of as many interested people as possible. Having said this, I still have very few readers in the countries that have joined the EPC recently.
