A Criminally Run

UK Patent Office

The content of this page is based on my own experience and dealings with the United Kingdom Patent Office. This Office is being run criminally. The current Comptroller and his Deputy should be removed from Office immediately. These two people and their apalling attitudes towards intellectual property is compromising the power and integrity of the Office and it is horrifying. I will be the first one to say that everyone makes mistakes and I accept that in normal everyday life, people become complacent or disinterested in their jobs; but it gets to a point where it isn’t any longer mistakes or mal-adminstration - it is fraud and crime to rip off applicants and innovators to make profit for Government and without having any interest whatsoever in anything anyone files with the Office. That, in my view, is totally unacceptable and immoral. In all the years that I have dealt with the UK Patent Office I can wholeheartedly say that that Office is in a complete mess and in absolute administrative chaos. I have hundreds of pages of correspondence that I will be publishing that illustrates the UK Patent Office’s total incompetence and proof that they are stealing people’s money. I do not have anything positive to say about that Office and it needs to be completely shut down, the staff all retrained and then only reopened once the mess has been resolved. I will be publishing a whole catalogue of errors made by that Office and proof that they refuse to address any of these problems or take years to put any of it right. The Defendants have deliberately taken advantage of a failed, lax and broken system and have just bulldozed it, knowing that they are being shielded and protected by the UK Authorities. This is a total disgrace and injustice to everyone taking enormous financial risks to invest in themselves and the Country. If mistakes are made, then the right course of action would be to admit your mistake and put it right; not deliberately fail to take any action at all, shield yourself from the truth that you have made errors and then push back at the complainant. Fraudulently drafting letters to try to put the blame on the victim of your incompetence is a criminal offence under the Fraud Act 2006. In years of civil litigation against my opponents, the Patent Office played a part in rubbishing my patents and aided and abetted the Defendants. At one time I requested an official ‘opinion’ on patent infringement from the Office. They told me that they didn’t know how an ‘opinion request’ should be drafted and so I wrote pages of the history of my patents etc. and took photos of the offending products that infringe my patents. I didn’t want to leave anything out. The Office then asked my opponents for their response and they deliberately submitted yet another false and fraudulent design drawing to the Office to support their denial of IP fraud. The drawing is now proven in evidence to be false, therefore commiting further crime to support their attempts to try to get around my patent. They also provided a legal argument drafted in a unique and particular way and then when the Patent Office gave their final outcome, they presented the exact legal argument given to them by the defending barristers!! This is ridiculous and for the sole purpose of deliberately rubbishing my patent rights. It would be obvious to a child that my patent had been stolen. This is sinister. Someone else commented “what a ghastly state of affairs”. It shows the level of corruption and the dead refusal to enforce IP rights at any cost whatsoever. After several more hearings in the London courts and before the Court of Appeal, it was agreed that I had proven the critical point of patent infringement and with all the other surrounding evidence (such as the unlawful use of my name on the Defendants purchase orders to order the goods), it is undeniable that the Defendants set out to rob and defraud me. After this hearing I went back to the Patent Office and paid 50 pounds for the opinon to be reviewed now that I had judicial evidence on a critial point proving that my patent had been infringed. The Office stone walled me and refused to review their opinion and also refused to return my 50 pounds, which is also called ‘theft’. Then they made every excuse under the sun as to why they wouldn’t review the opinion and did everything they could to try to block my claim for my rights. This is a Government Office, run and controlled by the UK Government and they refuse to enforce IP. There is not a single claim in the history of the United Kingdom where an individual has been awarded multi-million pound payouts for IP related offences. My advice to anyone reading this is do not ask the United Kingdom Patent Office for their opinion because it is worthless - they don’t have any integrity and they don’t have any interest in seeing your rights enforced - talk is cheap at that Office. That particular situation above is a small part of the atrocious service and terrible mistakes being made every day by the UK Patent Office. Here is more of it below, and even the list below falls far short of the ordeals and rows I have had with that Office. There isn’t any polite or academic way of putting across how appalling the service of the Patent Office is, and I excuse my language here but the UK Patent Office just make fuck up, after fuck up, after fuck up, on a daily basis. Most of the staff really don’t have any idea of what they’re doing, they don’t understand the very system they are implementing and they don’t have any interest at all in protecting individuals and their creative rights. The sad part about it is that they literally just don’t care! They really don’t give a toss about anyone’s applications as long as they can continually take their salaries and use the Office as a career stepping stone. That Office just takes people’s money to create jobs for the boys who have a job to turn up to the following day. I would say that is unlawful. It is also of no surprise that things have gone the way they have when all of this mess is taken into consideration. This entire situation is really an atrocity for every creative individual having a go and making a contribution to the UK; a contribution that is unrecognized or just lost. Here are a few examples of the problems that I’ve had to deal with on a regular basis: The Patent Office takes 6-7 years to grant a patent. This is idiotic. Absolutely idiotic. In 6-7 years it is most likely one’s market has gone and the heavy investment is a complete waste of time or other newer innovations have become established therefore ruining one’s investment. The Office admits it has trouble recruiting staff that have any interest in Intellectual Property. Staff don’t know the answers to many simple questions and constantly make horrendous clerical errors. At one time I phoned the office to ask about extending a search application by an extra month. I knew I had to use a form 52 because I had done it before but just wanted to confirm. I spoke to Tracy Walters who is usually on the ball but it wasn’t her department so she transferred me to ‘an expert in the examinations department’. I put my question to the ‘expert’ and he had no idea. He told me ‘please stay on the phone whilst I ‘Google it’ for you’. This conduct is appalling – an examiner who doesn’t even know what form to use to extend a time period and has to ‘Google’ it. This is one of the simplest parts of the patent process. Should this person be an examiner? Regular miscalculations about fees, timelines, filing dates and general misinformation which leads to horrendous problems and losses of your IP. Horrendous misadvice on many many aspects of the patent process. No two examiners are the same – they don’t understand the system or they interpret the process in a way that their individual minds can understand which leads to all different ideas of whether an application is patentable or not. This again is ludicrous. The staff should be consistent in every part of the process and they should all be trained in the same way. They should all be implementing the system in the same way. An example is divisional applications. The idea behind a divisional is that the applicant may possibly be able to get two ideas patented out of one parent application. I was doing this a lot because it seemed to be the best option in a very bad system of widening my legal protection. The USA system is different. One year I was told that a divisional must be completely different to its parent application although it should be broadly based around the same concept and that it was difficult to obtain a divisional because everything was obvious to a skilled workman putting the know how in the patent to use. I argued this crazy system with one examiner and eventually had a divisional granted. How can everything be obvious? If everything was obvious there wouldnt be innovation because everything would instantly materialise! Then several years later I was told by another examiner during another divisional application that the Office had to give permission to apply for a divisional and that the application had to be a precise and accurate EXACT copy of the original application and I could only change the claims but nothing else. These two opinions are in complete contrast of one another. How on earth does anyone know what is valid and what isn’t? All one can be sure of is that at least they have a patent certificate – validity and enforceability? Forget it. Advising me to let patents lapse instead of paying late renewal fees which led to enormous issues on restoration etc and cost me over 500 pounds, months of arguments and meetings to put it right. Frequent clerical errors such as getting my name and dates wrong on correspondence. At one time the Patent Office wrote to me asking me if they could use my work to train their staff. I said that would be fine provided that if they published anything and sold it, then I wanted a royalty. Their reply was ‘we don’t pay for the use of intellectual property’ . This symbolizes the United Kingdom’s attitude towards intellectual property rights - they just think those rights are completely worthless and yet demand payment for their service to grant and supposedly protect people’s creative ideas yet don’t want to pay for those rights themselves. One examiner had made a complete screw up on a series of patents for my Plantladders™ garden products and told me to abandon earlier applications. I did as she suggested and then she examined the subsequent application and told me that that particular feature in question would be protected by the first patent but then told me I had abandoned it!! This Office’s total incompetence is God damn unbelievable. The examiner then adamantly denied that she told me to abandon the application despite myself having it in her own words in correspondence she sent me. I then got into another row with the Office over yet another total screw up and loss of rights due to their total incompetence. In 2003 and in relation to my first patent GB2390104 the Patent Office told me the only way to secure foreign rights was to go through their PCT department who handled the applications directly. I made this application and then ran out of money and couldn’t continue it. It turned out years later that this was an outright lie and that I could apply to each individual country from within the UK or even apply through the European Patent Office which is £1500 cheaper. In other words the UK Patent Office was trying to take money from applicants for a service that they knew was available and easy to access and £1500 cheaper, just to generate income and jobs for the boys and made false statements to deter me from obtaining the same service that was cheaper elsewhere. This has had devastating effects on my patent rights and I will be taking this up with the Patent Office once this case has concluded, because that is unlawful. On another occasion I filed two trademark applications and paid for the Patent Office’s ‘quick start’ which involved paying part of the fee to see if the proposed mark has a chance of being registered. After some correspondence, the Office refused to check my proposed mark against the categories I had specified in my application and told me ‘you can’t possibly want your mark in all those categories’. I told the examiner that I had paid the fee for the number of categories and pointed out to him that how did he possibly know what I would use my mark for in the future after I had expanded into different areas in the market? I asked that if and when the time came that I need my mark in the categories I had applied for but which he refused to examine, would he be willing to pay the duplicated costs out of his own money? He refused all subsequent correspondence and didn’t examine the marks. He refused to process my application. The Patent Office refused to refund my money on either of the two marks even though only one was ever examined. That is called theft. I made a complaint to the Chief Executive’s office and they refused to return my money even though they didn’t provide the service and even though I had sent proof of the emails and communications between myself and the examiner. The root cause of it was because their flawed online trademark system couldn’t cope with a lengthy application which would have cost the office hundreds of thousands to resolve and fix by implementing a system that doesn’t run out of memory after you’ve selected more than 50 categories. For the reader, most very large worldwide companies would register their marks in hundreds of categories depending on their products and markets. IN 2018 this system, almost a decade later, has been improved and is used online, but it has taken a decade and I would be interested in knowing what the cost has been. On another occasion I was told that I didn’t need to specify every individual category – I only needed to specify the classification heading and that the Office would assume I wanted to cover every category within the classification. I did this and followed their instructions and then when it came to examination I was told this particular application wasn’t valid because someone else had a similar mark and had specified particular categories which they had told me not to do. It really is just screw up after screw up. On one patent application I tried introducing the Patent Office to a new way of drafting claims that clearly identifies and separates independent claims and dependent claims, similar to the US system (I had had a dispute with the Office about the fact that they fail to recognise independent claims, which restricts and devalues every patent every drafted using the UK system). My proposed new way of drafting claims would have bolstered up the entire patent system and made patents tighter and more valuable. The main advantage of the system I proposed was that several executions of the same idea could be covered by one patent rather than people having to file divisional patents and dozens of other patents at phenonemal cost. I filed this system in one of my Plantladders® patents and the examiner went along with it until at some point she must have had her boss over-rule her as she suddenly came back and said “the Patent Office definitely recognises independent claims as long as they all depend on claim 1” !!! What a joke! Stupid pathetic little English idiot. She is saying that they don’t recognize independent claims at all. In hindsight and several years later I now realise that the Patent Office will never ever accept such a system because it would produce stronger patents, the Patent Office would lose money because they wouldn’t have as many applications to process and the entire legal system only accepts a single claim in claim 1 of every patent, regardless of how many independent claims you cite in your claims. This is also partly why I lost in the civil proceedings because the judge refused to take into account all the other claims cited in my patent. [IN 2017- 2018 it is now proven in evidence that I lost the civil case due to judicial corruption and crime - hence this website!] If one also takes into account the claims in my patent GB2390104 it clearly states claims to allow for modifications, different hole and flange positions etc. A five year old can see the defendants have just come along and stolen my patent. Basically, the UK Patent System is a complete failure. The problem is that the UK patent laws have become so established based on this flawed system that it would be more or less impossible or at least very difficult to overhaul and change, which is why the old system stays as it is and is also the reason why intellectual property in the United Kingdom is completely worthless - because it is impossible to enforce it in the civil courts. On another occasion I needed to file documents with the US Office that claimed a UK priority. I drove to the Office in Newport to submit a form to request a copy of an application as granted. I paid £20 for this and actually spoke to someone who told me what to do and which form to use. I then had to wait 3 weeks for this file to come back and then to my dismay and disappointment the idiot processing the request sent me a copy of the file as originally filed and not as granted which is exactly what I didn’t want. I then had to wait another week for the correct file and incurred hundreds of pounds in costs with the US office for the delays. It’s ‘dress down day’ on a Friday at the Patent Office. This means staff don’t have to wear formal business attire; they just wear whatever they like to impress their colleagues. Along with it the staff dress themselves in casual attitudes and don’t pay any attention to what they’re doing. They are effectively being paid for working only four out of five days because the casual dress day is the casual attitude day. The drafting of letters, fraudulently, to make it look like the Patent Office are faultless and any errors are the fault of the applicant. This has wrecked my ‘spirit level bolt ons’ patent. I mean, come on, this surely cannot go on. There is an endless list of severe problems and errors that just should not be happening on a regular daily basis, if at all. The points above are not anywhere near a comprehensive list of all the problems I’ve had with that Office. The above is only what springs to mind as I’m writing this. This isn’t just one small mistake or mishap - this is a dreadfully flawed system which is a total failure. These mistakes make a very grave impact on the ability to enforce a patent and on the validity of the patent itself. In my piece on ‘what is intellectual property’ (menu bar above), I have taken time to explain the importance of intellectual property rights which I believe are the foundation of the economy. These rights are to be respected and should be held in extremely high esteem. They represent our achievements, knowlegde and talents which is how Country’s are evaluated - human capital and all that. For the UK Patent Office to have such and abusive, evasive and degrading approach towards intellectual property equates to Human Rights abuse. The UK Government telling everyone to do more and invest more and drive the Country forward, taking people’s money, and then doing everything they can to rubbish your efforts is a criminal offence under EU law. It makes a complete mockery of the entire system. This is happening NOW in the UK. Every word of this is true and I will publish all of the correspondences I have had with that Office to prove it. We are already in World War III. It is an Economic War and the UK doesn’t have any chance of winning or being a runner up. The Chinese are winning - the Americans are battling for their economy. These superpowers know very well how their economies are under threat and need to be protected. The UK is fucking clueless. These people are retards. Unless changes are made and implemented, and at an incredible pace, the UK is going to be completely bankrupt, if it isn’t already. In our new ‘shifted’ world, the UK will become a third world country of poverty, crime, and unhappiness. Do you really want to belong to that environment whilst the rest of the world sails by? I don’t. Here is a list of what needs to be changed: 1). Determining Infringement: When giving out opinions on infringement, it is a mistake to compare the original product to an offending product to decide infringement and what should be happening is that the offending product is deconstructed and pitted against the claims of the patent regardless of the similarities or differences between the two tangible products. This is a fundamental point that the Office either doesn’t understand or it is deliberately ignoring. Here’s why: We know that infringement disputes are caused by one product infringing the patent rights of the patent holder. In the drafting of my own opinion request I filed photographs of my product next to the offending product. I did this for several purposes: a). to show that parts of the offending product simply didn’t work without copying parts of my product in relation to how it had been manufactured and that it had to infringe some of my patent claims when considering the claims of the patent. I was demonstrating dimensional views and that the product was more or less of identical size. But this of course is what the thief is doing - they’re trying to produce something as close to the original as possible to defraud the inventor. We also need to redefine counterfeiting. b). to really show the criminal intent of the people manufacturing the offending product to target me and my products/patents. The problem I faced was that when someone is looking at two products and trying to decide if the offending product infringes the patent, the human brain is automatically trying to determine if one product simply copies another, which is where the flaw is. It is possible to produce multiple executions of the same idea or multiple designs of a product that will still infringe one’s patent even though any two products may look very different. This is why it is determined in law that the offending product has to be one step on from the scope of the patents claims. The idea has to be new and novel. Therefore when determining these infringement issues, I would advise that the offending product is compared to the patent claims and only compared to an inventor’s own product when determining the intent of the entity behind the offending product AND also use the original product for support facts or make determinations that the offending product has used the original product as a base or starting point for theft or fraud of the patent. In my civil case the judge just compared my product to the offending product and also allowed the trial to continue knowing that the offenders had attended court without the full sample apparatus so the judge couldn’t even see how the offending product worked. It is in fact worse than that - it is now proven that there was a lot of corruption and judicial crime behind it. Realising that it is a mistake to compare one product against another (as just explained) I took a fully set up arrangement of the offending product to the Court of Appeal and got a different result with conflicting findings of fact on the critical point therefore proving infringement. This is explained under the Evidence page, menu bar above. My claim was still rubbished by the Court of Appeal and I heckled the Judge and said ‘oh come on, it’s right there in front of you”. I was upset because it was obvious that my patent had been stolen and the Court of Appeal has just gone along deliberately preventing inventors enforcing their rights. You can see all the judgements and photos on the evidence page. 2. Patent Office Staff Training These people need to be trained in a high level of patent law. They need to fully understand how patents are infringed and the law behind it. No two examiners have the same opinion or even seem to be following the same criteria - it is ludicrous. 3. The recognition of independent claims This is the biggest flaw in the entire system - that all claims have to be dependent on claim 1. This means that the UK Government refuse to recognise independent claims that almost certainly would have to be taken into account when determining infringement, and it means that the entire system has been incorrectly set up from the outset. This is why the USA system is a much stronger and more valid system and it is very difficult to obtain patent rights because of the sheer number of previous innovations. This of course makes the system much more valuable and it properly protects innovators. Why do you think America has become a superpower in less than 200 years? When America was discovered, do you think the explorers just happened to stumble across a fully developed New York City or Silicone Valley? Of course not. It was founded with fewer people than inhabit the UK, they had less resources, and yet in under 200 years America has become the 1st world whilst the UK is left crippled and claims “oh but we have a special relationship” and all that rhetoric nonsense. The USA is a superpower because it protects its intellectual property. Recognising independent claims would immediately remove the need for divisional applications, (which are a crock of shit and completely wastes everyone’s time and money), and it would broaden protection of standard patents. All the administration with divisionals would be gone and it would free up the time for more important aspects that need more attention. By recognising independent claims, people wouldn’t be able to just come along and easily ‘design around a patent’ which is possible, but too easy to do within the current system. For the record I do not accept that any of the Defendants have ‘designed around my patents’ I an adamant that they have targeted me and my successful business and without doubt infringe my patents, but what they have done is commited serious IP crime, which the UK refuses to enforce. Also by recognising independent claims, the patent would be able to produce more products under its umbrella of protection and it would increase value. It would also be easier to determine infringement and the innovator would benefit from reduced application and maintenance fees, which of course the UK Government doesn’t want. This is a critical change and it means changing the entire system and the justice system, however - this could be easily done. There could be a cut off date where the system migrates to the new system etc. But if you refuse to enforce IP because you’re a pathetic little nation that hates profit and loves the social benefits state, no amount of changes is going to make the slightest bit of difference. If you want innovation go to North America, if you want a nation where innovation is dead because they hate profit and success, come to the UK. 4. Extending life of IP for individuals 20 years is nothing. In the world of business and products, monopolies and capitalism, 20 years (the life of a patent) is gone just like that. I know because i’ve been doing it for longer than 20 years. See my Richard Perry life page and the fencebrackets story. I can assure you that starting with nothing from scratch to building an empire based on IP rights, 20 years will swiftly pass. I suggest that for inventors being small entities and/or individuals, the life of a patent should be extended to 30 years. There are ways of extending the patent life now but it is costly, it diminishes the level of protection and it dliutes the integrity of the whole system. I’m not going to tell people what those ways are because it shouldn’t be done. These things are not necessarily unlawful but it is playing a system that wasn’t intended to be played for the sake of profit. I think the system needs to be changed. 5. A change in the law or proper enforcement for global protection in a globalised world. This is partly where I have fallen victim to one group of the Defendants. What they are doing is using their associated, sister, or foreign firms to put the know how in the patent to use in territories where your IP rights are not in force but knowing that they are injuring you and stealing value, or even just stealing your idea. Usually inventors such as myself simply do not have the funds to pay for global protection because it is extremely expensive. However the intent of taking your ideas out of your home territory because they don’t want to pay for the use of IP rights is criminal because they’ve started it in the UK. It is called conspiracy under the criminal law act 1977. This stems back to corporate responsibility - knowing that an inventor has created something and then stealing it out of his home country because you think you’re out of his reach so you can defraud him is unethical, reckless and sinful. The UK courts need to wake up and start enforcing IP and axe the fuddy duddy pathetic old men in positions of Authority who make statements along the lines of “you would have to be a large manufacturer for your patent to be worth anything at all” and who despise the thought of entrepreneurs making fortunes from their intellectual property rights. These rights pay your God damn salary little man. Where do you think profit comes from??? There is going to have to be some sort of global patent protection available to inventors for a short period of time such as five years. They could pay a fixed sum for protection worldwide which would give them time to get to market or see if there is any interest and where they could get licencing deals or partners from worldwide companies. After five years has expired, the inventor can opt to chose to continue the worldwide protection at a fixed cost or chose to reduce the number of territories and only pay the fees for those individual territories, but the patent would still be alive AND CONTINUE FOR A FURTHER 20 YEAR PERIOD. Because not everything will necessarily sell anywhere - markets, cultures, etc. etc. Worldwide companies who want to use the patents would then know that an individual has made their investment into it and there would have to be severe punishment for then subsequently waiting five years or until the inventor has ran out of money to steal his patent. It would have to be criminal sanctions. My proposed system would offer more protection and increase the value and power of the whole system and deter those such as the Defendants that want to butcher start up enterprises and wreck people’s lives for the sake of a bit of profit. Is this really the value of life now? You can’t think of anything for yourself so you go around robbing, stealing and butchering individuals using daddy’s money or corporate resources to do it, trampling all over people who are making lawful contributions to the Country.