Summary: Translation of a new article from Punto Informatico, which criticises the European Patent Office (EPO) for trying to silence longtime critics by cherry-picking articles and issuing threats
THE EPO has attempted to silence us and by this stage we have said most of what we had to say. The media, however, is still catching up. For the record, here is everything we have written on the subject so far, in chronological order:
There are more in-betweens in the Wiki, but we consider them a little less relevant, or only indirectly relevant to the subject at hand.
This
new article from
Punto Informatico appeared on Wednesday morning. The site had been writing
some articles about the EPO before, so its authors weren't exactly unfamiliar with the many issues. When I found the article (I got alerted about it) I sent it to some friends who can speak Italian and without having to wait long someone not only responded with a summary (as some did) but even gave a full translation into English. The article is citing
Techrights mostly, and it focuses on the above events. We want it sort of archived in English because it helps reinforce our view that, having seen several such articles on the Web, they are all supportive of our positions and condemn the EPO.
"I can throw down a quick translation of the article in Punto Informatico," told us one person, "if you haven't got one yet. I'll send it to you in a while."
Here is the translation which we consider quite accurate (RS being my initials and BB being Battistelli, for short):
EPO. patenting lawsuits.
The European patent office has accused a blogger of having published a post with defamatory content and it has threatened him with legal action. These events took place in October when the blogger Mr RS - known for having expressed in the past a lot of criticism towards the European patent office and towards its President Mr BB - published in his Blog Techrights a post with the title "EPO, aiding a racketeer", where he related to some preferential treatment granted by EPO to big corporations such as Microsoft, via some internal procedure.
According to some observers anyway, the concerned post only represents one last among many occasions for RS to criticise the organisation of EPO, accused by him many times before to act arbitrarily and with a corporate conduct beyond any law, even beyond the laws protecting employees and visitors, often obliged to allow deep and accurate searches upon themselves.
All this considered, threatening to press charges onto a blogger from the side of an institution, which is a consortium of national governments appears to be absolutely exaggerated.
On the other side RS, a well known presence for his thousands of posts, often with polemic content, has taken the chance to answer the threats: "It's incredible that in spite of being a public institution, EPO intimidates National delegates, Lawyers, Union/Staff(1) delegates, and now even journalists and bloggers. This is the evidence that EPO not only suffocates any dissent internally, but also externally."
For the moment, EPO has not commented further.
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(1) this word is actually missing in the Italian version, but it would make little sense without it.
For the record, "EPO, aiding a racketeer" was not the title of the post (it's gentler than this) -- a mistake that's often repeated by the media because the article is not publicly available.
I will stay up until 4AM tonight (for the third night in a row, leaving me too little time to sleep) in order to release some important articles and keep the promise of
accelerating coverage to avenge the EPO's menacing ways. There are negative and positive developments right now, negatives being more intense attacks by the EPO's management and positives being an unprecedented level of dissent at the EPO, with thousands signing petitions and an unprecedented number of staff members attending protests.
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