The Patented European Inventor of the year
Yesterday, was held the First Edition of the European Inventor of the Year FFII was there
- The first edition of the "European Inventor of the Year", jointly organised by the European Commission and the European Patent Office, was held at the Hotel Le Plaza in with the gala dinner and awards ceremony taking place at the Autoworld Museum on 3 May. Though being not officially invited, FFII came to attend this patented event. There were apparently no other association such as FFII advocating for copyright, interoperability and open standards. Only developers and inventor linked to important firms as IBM or Nokia, IPR specialised lawyers and of course, a lot of members of the EPO. Unsurprisingly, European SMEs were clearly not represented.
- The emphasis of the first-day conferences was put on the challenges and the economic potential of patenting in Europe. Of course, patents were presented as the unique solution to protect inventions in the context of free market. Of course, patents were presented as the real panacea to promote competitive economy and support innovation in Europe. The polemic software patent case was sort of eluded. It looks like an "autocelebration" of the EPO illegal practices.
For more informations on the details on this very special program, see http://www.european-inventor.org/conference_programme.php
- Concerning the awards ceremony to which we couldnt attend because it was to expensive, only nominees belonging to industrial groups having registered patents to the EPO were represented. That is to say, the European inventor of the year was also necessarily the one who have registered a high number of inventions to the EPO. We finally succeeded into interviewing one of the nominees, the non-European Charles E. Perkins, presently working for Nokia.
For a peace of the transcription of our interviews at the Autoworld, please see http://wiki.ffii.org/Perkins030506En
- To conclude we could renamed this EPO event as the Patented European Inventor of the Year. The patent ideology was omnipresent, other associations such as FFII promoting an alternative model of competitive economy were simply not invited and nominees for the European of the Year belonged necessarily to industrial groups closely linked with the EPO. Possibilities of open dialogue were unfortunately rare.
