11.16.17
The Staff Union of the EPO (SUEPO) is Rightly Upset If Not Shocked at What Battistelli and Bergot Are Doing to the Office
The shock is probably years behind as this was foreseen/expected by many insiders
Summary: The EPO’s dictatorial management is destroying everything that’s left (of value) at the Office while corrupting academia and censoring discussion by threatening those who publish comments (gagging its own staff even when that staff posts anonymously)
THE EPO is racing to the bottom. It’s rushing to the very bottom of patent quality, just like in China — a recipe for plenty of litigation and trolls (threat of litigation alone can help extract ‘protection’ money).
SUEPO’s response to the EPO’s latest changes (effective weeks from now) was covered yesterday based on internal communications. These are changes which would definitely breed corruption, as we explained yesterday (as far as we are aware, we were the first to cover this).
WIPR wrote a puff piece with only quotes/comments from the patent microcosm, but the following is at least airing the response of SUEPO. To quote some portions:
In an internal memo, the Staff Union of the European Patent Office (SUEPO) described the move as “Kafkaesque”.
The outgoing EPO president Benoît Battistelli entered the proposal alongside the EPO’s director of human resources Elodie Bergot at the Budget and Finance Committee’s meeting on 24 October.
SUEPO revealed that the proposal was met with criticism from the budget and finance committee, particularly from representatives for Italy, the UK, Poland, and Germany.
According to SUEPO, Battistelli took issue with the criticism, intimating that “it was his prerogative to govern until the last day of his mandate”.
Battistelli is understood to have argued that the proposal had “no financial implications” and therefore he was free to push it through to the administrative council in December without the consent of the budget and finance committee.
SUEPO said that there is a “serious risk that this plan will blow up”.
[...]
The memo stated: “There will be no professional pride, no incentive to invest in quality, no stimulus to bind the employee to the EPO and keep him/her loyal and immune from temptation.”
“With a precarious future, there will be a temptation to squirrel away as much cash as possible for the post-EPO life. Some will do so honourably, others perhaps less so. Employees have access to highly confidential, sensitive industrial secrets worth hundreds of millions of euro.”
Imagine all the erroneously-granted patents and what they would cause. Innocent parties (people/firms) would be hurt. To make matters worse, Team Battistelli and Team UPC try to make it easy for trolls/aggressors to sue a lot of nations/firms in one fell swoop. They crafted the UPCA behind closed doors and are now spreading lies in a desperate effort to ratify their evil scheme as law. It is an insult to European democracy and it also corrupts European media, academia, and the rule of law.
As we explained yesterday, corruption of academia by the EPO is the latest phase. They want people with fancy titles like “professor” to say that the UPC would be good, knowing that there’s always someone out there willing to sell out.
As expected, Team UPC is all over this. Kluwer Patent Blog did this puff piece yesterday. This is probably Bristows or Pors writing anonymously (“Kluwer UPC News blogger”), in essence pushing Battistelli-generated UPC lies and anticipating backlash (hence the anonymity). Watch the comments. As one person put it: “Bearing in mind that EPO et al. will soon have to submit their comments in the German constitutional complaint proceedings, the timing and purpose of this “study” is all too obvious. Expect more along these lines in the coming weeks.”
“The full impact of the Unitary Patent system has nót been investigated,” it says. How corrupt does the EPO think it can get in an effort to force the UPC upon Europe? How much lying and even falsification is Team UPC willing to resort to? Bristows LLP’s Gregory Bacon’s blog post has just appeared in Lexology (same name, same text), which means that Bristows is now even PAYING to publish its ‘articles’ that push UPC lies, based on a ‘report’ that the EPO was PAYING academics to produce!
They are corrupting academia now. It’s appalling. To repeat: Bristows pays for just a copy of its blog (which lacks an audience) to be pushed into news feeds, spreading UPC lies which were paid for at the expense of EPO stakeholders (who are being lied to by Battistelli).
Who does one report such corruption to? Is there no ethical breach here? Should we contact the respective universities or alert the German court?
The EPO is nowadays isolating itself from everyone. Yesterday it mentioned professional representatives, but professional representatives associated with the EPO — just like EPO staff — have gotten fed up with the EPO and Battistelli’s culture.
Don’t expect to see anything about Battistelli in IP Kat. It has made it pretty clear that names cannot be mentioned and as one person put it yesterday: “I take it that comments about the comment moderation system are automatically eliminated….”
Obviously. By “eliminated” s/he means “censored” (which is why we try to preserve copies of comments which do appear and are relevant). █
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john said,
November 17, 2017 at 6:20 am
I don’t see how the EPO is going to find recruits under that new contract form.
The EPO only recruits examiners fresh from the University. They don’t want anything else and the pay for people with experience is not attractive anyway, especially in Munich where the industry is also recruiting engineers and scientists. But for someone fresh from the University, the first job will determine the rest of your career. An employer will typically look at your past 5 years experience and not at your diplomas any more. So if you start your career with patents, it will be very difficult to do anything else afterwards.
But in patents, there are only two jobs: patent examiner and patent attorney. The EPO is basically the only provider of patent examiner jobs in Europe, so if they fire you after 5 years, that road is closed. Patent attorneys cannot absorb a significant number of recruits either. They never did, they are not going to change their policy when the office starts laying off people in significant numbers after 5 years. So, basically, after 5 years you are out of a job with no perspective.
Besides I don’t understand the need for the new policy. The EPO can already fire people at will, they even did so for a judge and some staff representatives.