Whereas the substantive provisions of the 1973 European Patent Convention, on the patentability of new and useful subject matter, are adopted by ever more countries, the harmonisation of the mechanisms for the courts quickly to enforce good patents and equally quickly to extinguish bad ones is proving ever more problematic.

The idea in 1973 was to reach a European consensus BOTH on getting to grant AND on getting to injunctive relief from infringement. The former was achieved, and has been a roaring success. The latter not. And still isn’t.

Rocky road? As seen from Europe? Absolutely. And becoming ever rockier.

Compared with the hard graft of building things up, to synthesise, to co-operate towards a win-win outcome, to the benefit of all, it is so achingly easy for the populists to lay to waste all that hard work of building consensus and, instead, set people against each other.

It is beyond me. What exactly does Issa have against Canada, with his:

“They decided that if you didn’t tell people how important your patent was, with specificity, they would just invalidate your patent”

I suspect what he doesn’t like about patent law in Canada is that it resembles the patent law found everywhere else in the world than the patent law of the USA. What an affront. Could that be what is riling him so much? Readers?