EPO Online Patent DB Requires Microsoft OS

Seth Johnson seth.johnson at realmeasures.dyndns.org
Sun Feb 9 15:12:34 UTC 2003


(Forwarded from Patents list)

-------- Original Message --------
Date: Sun,  9 Feb 2003 16:04:55 +0100 (CET)
From: PILCH Hartmut <phm at a2e.de>
To: epo at mlist.austria.eu.net
CC: patents at aful.org, intprop-l at topica.com, horns at ipjur.com

Hi,

At 

        http://www.epoline.org/

one can supposedly inspect the current state of an EPO
patent.

Unfortunately I was, after a few attempts, not able to do
this with any patent, and at

        http://www.epoline.org/epoline/pfifaq.html

I find an FAQ which teaches me that I have to use the
Microsoft operating system platform with specific browsers
that use specific versions of the Java Virtual Machine.  I
of course use none of these but browsers like Konqueror,
Opera and Lynx.

If the EPO's goal is to make information publicly
accessible, why can't you keep things simple and adhere to
publicly specified standards, such as HTML 4.0 (see
www.w3c.org) ?

Meanwhile the problem about which I was complaining this
morning seems to have been fixed, but the observation
remains that espacenet.com could have been made more
transparent and robust.  Since epoline.org is still in the
beta phase, perhaps some bad design decisions of
espacenet.com could be avoided rather than repeated in even
worse form.

Btw, is intprop-l at topica com still operating ? My
postings didn't seem to arrive there and I received only one
mailing from AHH this year.


-- 
Hartmut Pilch, FFII & Eurolinux Alliance              tel.
+49-89-12789608   
Protecting Innovation against Patent Inflation	    
http://swpat.ffii.org/
130,000 signatures against software patents     
http://www.noepatents.org/



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