Contacting European Patent Office (EPO)

This is to prepare contacting the (EPO).

What we want from the EPO:

• Guarantee that it does not patent hardware/designs that have been published on FCOS before.
• Where would FCOS-designs need to be published/findable in order for the EPO to find it during its patenting-process?
• Once EPO has found a design on FCOS that possibly matches a patenting candidate from EPO patenting-process, what are the specifications of a technical documentation on FCOS in order for EPO to determine matching and discontinues patenting-process?

Acceptance Criteria

• Draft an initial contact e-mail

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https://www.epo.org/searching-for-patents/technical.html

I would recommend to first look out for informal contacts, I could e.g. reach out to Frank Tietze (https://www.ifm.eng.cam.ac.uk/people/ft263/) who has a good understanding and does some interesting research here.

Mirko Böhm who is a graduate from HSU might also be a person to talk to - Tobias and I know him from a EU Event on Open Source, I think he even contributed to this EU OS Study. https://www.linkedin.com/in/mirkoboehm/

I also met Beth Novack once who conducted interesting projects in the US (https://thegovlab.org/projects.html; https://thegovlab.org/project/project-peer-to-patent), in fact she is also advising the Bundesregierung (https://www.bundesregierung.de/breg-de/themen/digitalisierung/beth-simone-noveck-1505576).

We should also better understand the role of the DPMA. Here, Bucerius Law School should be integrated as the have a sound knowledge of patenting processes.

Maybe we should even think of framing it into a Workshop or invite someone to one of our events.

I can try to reach out to those people, when we know what we would like to know...

Thanks. Now I am sitting on the Schlauch a little, dont really know how to best proceed @manuel.moritz

Is this an urgent issue for IF? If so, who would be responsible? I am not sure... thus I would keep it in the backlog and discuss next year. Maybe this could be a task for Rodrigo. For sure, I would propose to discuss this issue with Fabian and colleagues in one of the research meetups or bilateral, maybe it can also be covererd via dtec.BW

Thanks.

For the conversations with companies we have already started, it could be convincing to have a positive feedback from EPO. So it is high priority but early next year should be fine.

We might have a new team member with a strong background in innovation management beginning January. He could take over here, in fact, we have a task related to local SMEs. Could be a match.

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• I also don't see this primarily a topic to talk to with the EPO. The contacts of #93 (comment 2560) are the way to go. The relations to the Bucerius Law School and other Law experts should be our focus first.

• Remember: Already published Inventions (only Inventions can be patented) cannot be patented!

• regarding the third point: Thats depends. But usually it's depends on each case. So I think that is nothing to worry about now.

-> It think a focus of our work should be to educate People on the topic of Patenting. Let us thing about how we can generate educational Resources that are helpful for the community.

@mikelovic this could be a use case where you show us how to do an OER in the right way.

@benedikt

• can recommend this OER from Martin from OSEG which can already be use in a good way, could be copied in our wiki maybe? -> https://md.opensourceecology.de/p/H13RyulYw#/
• and the other osh basic content https://gitlab.com/osh-academy/osh-basics as well

OER in the right way is very broad...and i am not interested in teaching about patents...more in about open-source :)

mentioned in issue #98 (moved)

assigned to @benedikt

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unassigned @benedikt