SOME READERS have pointed out to us that it's virtually impossible to find out what happened with the EPO and Microsoft. It's a riddle, owing to secrecy.

"See attached printout from the webpage of the Administrative Council," readers noted. See the image on the right.

From the website: "In a move towards greater transparency, the European Patent Office is improving the access to the documents of the Administrative Council of the European Patent Organisation. Under this new policy, all public documents of the Administrative Council will be made available after each session and published on the EPO's website. The documents of the October 2012 session are already accessible.

"It's almost as though it is deliberately broken or it was never made to work properly at all."Now go to this page (warning: epo.org link) and then compare the statement to what can be found in the search page (warning: epo.org link). I've reproduced this at my end on video. No preparation (we never script videos or edit them). The page says: "On this page you can search for publicly available Council documents, including preparatory documents for Council decisions."

"If you search under the topic "Award of Contracts" it returns 0 hits," our readers note. "Impressive transparency..."

I get the same thing and to make matters worse the search facility seems worse than useless. It's almost as though it is deliberately broken or it was never made to work properly at all. I explain this in the video. No preparations, spontaneous as always. Readers can have a go at it and reproduce it at their end very quickly.

The antiscientific management of the EPO (Benoît Battistelli and António Campinos aren't just unscientific but antiscientific because they attack scientists) has turned the EPO into a laughing stock. It's not helping that many in the Administrative Council are also nontechnical, so they probably cannot understand that European software patents are neither wanted nor legal. All they want is fancy charts showing the number of granted patents going up. The science associated with the impact of such patents doesn't interest them.

In the next part of the series we'll have a lot more to say.

We've meanwhile gotten documents we're not 'supposed' to have. So our reporting on this blunder will soon be including some 'smoking guns'. Stay tuned... ⬆