THE previous EPO President, Mr. Battistelli, was famous/infamous for his late Friday "fake news"; he became renowned for lying each time his lips moved or when he wrote something in his "blog" -- a blog that has not been updated for several months. Sometimes silence is better, at least better than lying.
epo.org link). There's a corresponding tweet with a photo, citing "EU Presidency conference on Intellectual Property in Bucharest". The summary/outline reads: "EPO President António Campinos has spoken about the importance of cooperation at an IP conference in Bucharest, Romania."
"So why won't he cooperate with the staff representatives at the Office? Not to mention the union..."How about cooperation with scientists? Or stakeholders? Since taking Office, the new President has done a lot of stonewalling and mostly flirted with lawyers, patent trolls, and their front groups. The views and opinions of scientists barely counted. We covered this aspect of the presidency many times before.
The subject has meanwhile changed to women's rights; a lot of patent-centric blogs and accounts exploited International Women's Day to promote patent maximalism -- a typical kind of exploitation of feminism for commercial (rich people's) goals rather than genuine equality. There was even this piece (warning: epo.org link) in the EPO's Web site. "The EPO celebrated International Women's Day on 8 March by launching "Women in the Lead", a mentorship programme in which senior managers will mentor women at the Office," reads the outline.
In Twitter the EPO then wrote, in its own words: "The EPO sets the “Women in the Lead” programme in motion - a mentoring initiative for women at the EPO looking into exploring managerial roles." Another adjacent tweet, something to a similar effect, said: "The world of science and innovation is changed by women from all over the world every single day. You can help us spread the word about some of the most extraordinary minds behind innovation."
"A lot of the hires are just German men 'next door' (close to the EPO) -- a fact that worried the Administrative Council as it harms the perception that the EPO is "pan European" or whatever..."The EPO's lack gender diversity is a subject we covered in past years [1, 2]. The male-dominated management pretends to like women so as to whitewash its crimes. The EPO has launched ‘Women in the Lead’, but there are no women in the lead in EPO and those who exist are connected to the people (males) who gave them the job, i.e. nepotism, e.g. Bergot and more recent (this year) examples.
It was always amusing when the EPO dared brag about "diversity" because there's no national diversity and no gender diversity either. A lot of the hires are just German men 'next door' (close to the EPO) -- a fact that worried the Administrative Council as it harms the perception that the EPO is "pan European" or whatever, unlike the Council, run by a German over the past couple of years (he's Vice-President now, having sucked up to António Campinos and looked the other way when he could stop or even sack Battistelli). ⬆