EPO Liability for Bad Patents

The big improvement you could make is to make the EPO liable for the commercial damage the issuing of a bad patent makes.

The EPO makes an assertion that a patent invention is new and novel and non obvious, but there's no comeback if they're wrong. They're like a civil engineer without insurance. If a civil engineer, or any other professional gives an opinion like that, they have a liability if they are wrong. The EPO can do far more damage, but has no liability for when it's wrong.

Industry faces catastrophic blocks to a market from these patents, (Blackberry being a big example of that), yet the patent office that made the false assertion that it was patentable has no comeback.

They just shrug their shoulders and continue like nothing happened. That in turn led the EPO to issue patents in areas where it has no way of testing new and novel.

The USA is a big example of the problems. USA has a huge and increasing trade deficit, so it doesn't look like wild free patenting is a substitute for competitive industry. And we have seen is tiny one or two man patent troll companies taking advantage of the system. They extract $100 million for a big corp and in turn that corp is $100 million less competitive.

So that's the big bonus item, that I'd like to see happen. If the EPO issue a patent, they should have a liability to compensate any damages incurred if that patent is found to be wrongly issued.