11.07.19
It Feels Like EPO Management is Trying to Distract the Media and the Staff From Today’s Big Protest
First Hague/Dutch protest in about a year and a half! (when Battistelli inaugurated an unfinished building)
Summary: It certainly feels like something we’ve seen before (and journalists told us about); the EPO strategically releases puff pieces about events that are about a week apart, possibly as means of distracting the media from what is about to happen (protest later today at The Hague)
THE European Patent Office’s (EPO) President António Campinos has been an utter failure. It may not seem so to the ‘outside world’ because the media is not at all reporting his failures, his lies, and the growing unrest among EPO staff. It also doesn’t report the constant violations of the law, which yield software patents under the guise of “hey hi” — an issue now celebrated by Watchtroll in an article entitled: “What to Know About the 2019 European Patent Office Guidelines for Examination”.
For one thing, they’re illegal. They compel examiners to break the law. We wrote many articles about this and last Friday examiners saw themselves facing a new dilemma: follow illegal orders or lose one’s job. “The European Patent Office (EPO) recently published its Guidelines for Examination 2019, which came into force on November 1,” Watchtroll wrote yesterday. They’re pleased to see the new loopholes for software patents or monopolies on maths and stats. Truly appalling! This is the kind of thing we’ve campaigned against for nearly 13 years (today we turn 13).
“They’re pleased to see the new loopholes for software patents or monopolies on maths and stats.”Anyway, there’s a protest today. We don’t know how many people will attend, but there’s a good reason for all staff on Dutch territories to attend. Things at the EPO will get yet worse before anything gets better; the writings are on the wall (or phony ‘studies’) as staff is further marginalised based on lies (or “false assumptions” as the union politely puts it).
We’ve noticed something irksome today and yesterday. Sometimes the EPO issues no “news” for weeks; but when this thing happens — like a protest coming — it can issue 3 in one day! We saw something similar when was G 2/19 (Enlarged Board of Appeal) was decided, as we noted several times that week. The last thing the EPO wanted back then was media coverage about how the EPO had violated its own law for a number of years*.
So what’s the ‘decoy’ or the media ‘bait’? Well, it’s a bunch of things that did not even happen at the same time. It’s almost as though those ‘puff pieces’ (‘fluff’) were amassed in ‘the queue’ for a while and then suddenly unleashed yesterday — the day some EPO staff may decide whether to march to the Portuguese embassy to demand action against Campinos.
“So what’s the ‘decoy’ or the media ‘bait’? Well, it’s a bunch of things that did not even happen at the same times.”We don’t wish to amplify this ‘fluff’ but merely to explain or rebut what we’re seeing. The first puff piece concerns Mexico (warning: epo.org link). There’s nothing wrong with Mexico (many headlines this week because of mass murder), but it’s not a strategic country to the EPO. But management of the EPO, knowing that staff is protesting today (and may soon go on strike as well), is desperate to make some puff pieces to distract from reality. This one says: “The EPO has signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) on Reinforced Partnership with the Mexican Institute of Industrial Property (IMPI), further strengthening the longstanding co-operation between Europe and Mexico in the area of patents. The MoU was signed on Monday in Mexico City by EPO President António Campinos and IMPI Director General Juan Lozano.”
On Monday. That’s several days before the EPO wrote about it. Why the wait?
On the same day (warning: epo.org link) the EPO wrote that “[t]he EPO has signed a validation agreement with the government of Georgia…”
Never mind if these countries have European Patents; some more photo ops from EPO shared nonetheless, bombarding the site with puff pieces ahead of today’s EPO protest. Based on the timestamps in the URL, those pieces were likely prepared a day in advance. This third puff piece, also stamped with the same date (warning: epo.org link), is a familiar stunt from the Battistelli days. The EPO’s management does photo ops with country that has no European Patents at all (and it's not just there that this is done). This is laughable, pathetic even. “A delegation from Cambodia led by Senior Minister of Industry and Handicraft Cham Prasidh visited the EPO on 31 October to meet with a team from the EPO headed by President António Campinos,” it says. And it took them one week to write about it? How curious!
No wonder SUEPO announces actions just a day or two in advance, depriving the EPO’s management the ‘intelligence’ it may leverage for ‘damage control’ purposes. We don’t think it’s unreasonable to assume or theorise or hypothesise that timing of these puff pieces was very much deliberate and had a purpose. We’re quite certain that the EPO’s PR staff is already bombarding so-called ‘journalists’ in so-called ‘IP’ ‘news’ sites, trying to convince them to write about this ‘fluff’ instead of the important action at The Hague (this coming afternoon)**. More on that soon. █
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* Also in the news yesterday, Iain Robertson (Haseltine Lake Kempner LLP) was, quite frankly as usual, neglecting to say that the Board of Appeal totally lacks independence and is being pressured by the Office (granting authority) to embrace patent maximalism and violate the law, or the EPC. Mondaq and other patent maximalists’ platforms never even mention the EPO scandals anymore. They hope that the public won’t pay attention to corruption at the EPO. Robertson wrote the following (like IP Kat last week):
Two recent decisions from the Boards of Appeal of the European Patent Office have highlighted the difficulties applicants and opponents can face when trying to reply on new experimental data to support their arguments.
[...]
In T 1422/12, the Board of Appeal decided that the technical problem could be formulated to include the further technical effect of increased stability, despite this not being disclosed in the application in relation to the invention, because the background section of the patent application underlying T 1422/12 related to improving the performance characteristics of pharmaceutical products, and thus the new technical problem did fall “within the framework of the invention as disclosed in the application in suit”.
The Board of Appeal decided that T 1422/12 and T 440/91 did not apply in this case, because the application did not indicate any improvement to a therapy, let alone improved bioavailability of CNP-53 in comparison to CNP-22, and so this further effect, shown by the post-published evidence, did change the character of the invention. Therefore this further effect cannot be taken into consideration when considering inventive step. Consequently, the Board of Appeal found the application lacked an inventive step, and the appeal was dismissed.
** I once met for coffee someone who had been constantly subjected to this and explained to me how the EPO’s PR people handle ‘the media’ when they issue these puff pieces. I also know the names of the people who do this and how they do this. It’s corrosive and offensive to honest journalists. They’re pressured to become ‘parrots’ of obvious – even to them — lies. That’s the business model!
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