Still on holiday?

Summary: Incompetent leadership at the European Patent Office (EPO) is letting down EPO stakeholders, who already turn elsewhere; but we need more information about what's going on inside EPOnia (the EPO's leadership seems to have chosen a low key or low profile strategy)

"Lawyers urge ‘unfriendly’ EPO to communicate venue changes," says this new headline from a publication very friendly towards António Campinos and Benoît Battistelli. But what it boils down to isn't the pattern of corruption and crimes at the EPO; it's about some minor technical or procedural frustration regarding "location of an oral hearing".

"Given this quiet atmosphere (SUEPO saying almost nothing at all, at least publicly), we cannot do much coverage."Admittedly, as we noted before, many blogs and news sites about patents keep perishing. Some become inactive, others go offline (gone completely, eternally inaccessible). Even coverage of USPTO affairs has become increasingly scarce. This is all measurable and we analysed/shared some statistics earlier this year. There are fewer posts/articles, fewer comments (below is a screenshot of Watchtroll as of this moment), and about 80% of the comments in IP Kat are rants about the scam which is CIPA's PEB. There's a lot of discontent.

The way things stand (at present at least), we cannot offer as much coverage regarding patents as we used to. It seems like the topic is sort of ebbing away, with the occasional (albeit infrequent) complaint about patent trolls and PTAB actions being initiated by Unified Patents. For nearly a month we've seen almost nothing about the Unified Patent Court (Unitary Patent) and all the EPO talked about in its news section was a bunch of nonsense:

Given this quiet atmosphere (SUEPO saying almost nothing at all, at least publicly), we cannot do much coverage. Not for the time being anyway... people are already back to work, so the summer vacation cannot be blamed for the calm (not anymore).

Do you know something we should know about internal EPO affairs? Do contact us. We promise confidentiality/source protection. ⬆