07.14.20
Gemini version available ♊︎The EPO’s Misleading ‘Studies’ Are Just More of the Same Perception Management Routines
António Campinos has put his 'Club Med' in charge of the EPO’s communications, too
Summary: EPO management pays sites to publish a bunch of EPO-controlled propaganda; and we’ve meanwhile noticed that almost everyone in the press team of the EPO has left (to be replaced by the President’s confidant)
THE journalists are typically on holiday (somewhere far) this time of the year. But this year is different. Many stayed home. Many are unemployed. Journalism in general is dying. Would anyone dare fact-check or scrutinise anything at all? Will anything that the European Patent Office says be subjected to sceptical and critical thinking? Well, maybe among EPO staff. EPO workers have long been lied to by António Campinos (and Benoît Battistelli before him). They’re told lots of lies about the financial situation of the Office, about quality and so on. They’re even told to grant illegal software patents in Europe provided the applicants says “HEY HI” (AI) or some other mindless buzzword. Even the US isn’t that foolish; 35 U.S.C. § 101 cases, as we’ve just noted in the latest Daily Links, almost always result in invalidation. Almost always.
“Yesterday the EPO vomited its latest faux ‘study’ (which puff pieces said would come shortly) into some incognito domain, “ResponseSource” (never heard of it before), which probably published this for a fee…”The EPO isn’t in the business of granting solid, defensible patents but granting as many patents as possible, as fast as possible (and then conflating speed with “quality”).
Yesterday the EPO vomited its latest faux ‘study’ (which puff pieces said would come shortly) into some incognito domain, “ResponseSource” (never heard of it before), which probably published this for a fee to say: “Patent applications at the EPO related to AM are rising rapidly, achieving average annual growth of 36% in recent years…” (that’s growth in requests for monopolies in the EPO, where quality of examination still declines rapidly, causing grant numbers to soar a lot more than “36% in recent years”)
Here’s a bunch of paragraphs:
A new study from the European Patent Office (EPO) reveals the United Kingdom as a leading European country in additive manufacturing (AM) innovation, also known as 3D printing. The United Kingdom accounts for 5% of AM patent applications at the European Patent Office (EPO), putting it in second place behind Germany with 19%. European patent applications for AM increased at an average annual rate of 36% from 2015 to 2018. This is more than ten times greater than the average yearly growth of all applications at the Office combined in the same period (3.5%). The report, entitled “Patents and additive manufacturing – Trends in 3D printing technologies”, further demonstrates that Europe is a global leader in AM, with European inventors and businesses accounting for almost half of AM patent applications filed with the EPO in the period from 2010 to 2018.
[...]
While two out of three patent applications in AM technologies were filed by very large companies, the study also reveals that companies with 15 to 1 000 employees accounted for 10% (or 2 148) of applications, individual inventors and small businesses with fewer than 15 employees generated 12% (or 2 584), and were responsible for over 11% (or 2 448), making these three cohorts significant actors in the AM innovation ecosystem. These findings are reflected in the figures for the United Kingdom where very large companies account for 63% of patent applications in AM technologies, followed by inventors and small businesses of up to 15 employees and universities, hospitals and public research organisations with both 14% and companies of up to 1 000 with 8%. British SMEs with notable activity in AM innovation are, among others, Embody Orthopaedic, a University College London spin-out, Fuel 3D technologies and Metalysis.
With the UK at 5% and Germany at 19% it’s clear that the EPO is hardly European. They even acknowledge it themselves. In this other press release the EPO acknowledges that the US is the ‘leader’ with 35%. There was also this teaser press release. Money is being wasted generating hype for a bunch of propaganda. As we noted the other day: “The launch will be preceded by a panel discussion between the President of the EPO, António Campinos, and the Executive Director of the European Union Intellectual Property Office (EUIPO), Christian Archambeau, followed by the presentation of the study by the EPO’s Chief Economist, Yann Ménière.”
This “EPO press desk” and ‘studies’ won’t really improve the EPO itself; they’re all just an exercise in reputation laundering, in this case attributed to:
Luis Berenguer Giménez
Principal Director Communication
Spokesperson of the EPO
Rainer Osterwalder
Press spokesperson
EPO press desk
We’ve just noticed that except for Osterwalder all the people in the page are relatively new. It means that everyone except Osterwalder has left. Or was relocated. Here’s a screenshot:
Luis Berenguer Giménez is also in the Management Committee (warning: epo.org link). According to this from 2015 [PDF], Campinos brought him from OHIM (EUIPO). So the person in charge of EPO communications is an old colleague of Campinos. According to the Wayback Machine, Luis Berenguer Giménez was added some time before the pandemic (hard to tell when exactly).
We don’t know when exactly each one of the previous members of staff left; all we know is, Osterwalder is the only one who has been there for longer than a few years. That says a lot, doesn’t it? They’re just lying and lying to the media.
Speaking of lies, take a look at today’s loaded headline from Gregory Bacon of Bristows. BMJV and Germany are not the same thing. BMJV is looking to violate the constitution, break the law and so on [1, 2, 3]. BMJV does not represent Germany or Germans.
Bacon says that “in addition to the possibility of further constitutional challenges (by, for example, the FFII: FFII’s response to consultation), it is not yet clear whether all the member states who were planning to participate in the UPC will agree with the German government’s proposals. Some indication of that (and other views on a unitary patent and UPC system without the UK) may be obtained in the consultation the European Commission is carrying out on an IP Action Plan.”
Bacon, like Osterwalder, is one of Bristows’ very few people who stayed there to promote the UPC. The other ones vanished (retired early, moved to another firm etc.) and months ago we heard that Margot Fröhlinger had left (though some people refuted this rumour). Here we have Carl Josefsson and Margot Fröhlinger pushing UPC half a decade ago (warning: epo.org link); this did not age well, did it? These people, especially the latter (Fröhlinger), spent many years constantly lying to us. How foolish they look now. What kind of legacy have they left behind? █
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