Dear all

please see attached the outcome of the discussions at the Admin Council.

it is a success that they had to consider the issue. I also got signals that more information about our report was shared.

however, in terms of our goals, this is not a huge step forward.

To me, it is evident that our current approach to fix the problems by small technical /legal steps is not moving ahead as needed.

Despite our proposals seem open up an avenue to solve the problems without change of laws, political willingness to take next steps is not yet achieved. But it still might be achieved.

for general strategy, we could decide to act less technical (less detailed), less on legal arguments - our arguments seem to be quite solid. Instead, we should consider how to involve broader public to larger extent (as we started with our petition).

we could, for example, now again build on specific single applications and develop stories and mobilise public to prevent specific patents to be granted.

More generally, to my opinion, the key target group of our communications might no longer be the decision making bodies (like patent experts) but (again) broader public.

Anyway, I hope we can find a good way forward for the next months to prevent the EPO from sending us a similar letter at the end of 2021.

I would like to share the letter with WeMove and Umweltinstitut. It looks like they want to send a signal to their supporters. Maybe we also can develop a few lines for public communication for our website, newsletter and social media.

I try to draft something.

Cheers

Christoph