11.28.21
Gemini version available ♊︎By 2022 0% of ‘News’ Coverage About Patents Will Be Actual Journalism (Patent Litigation Sector Has Hijacked the World Wide Web to Disseminate Self-Promotional Misinformation)
Video download link | md5sum 3ec4eadab0b6d2d6dd1d32598e7051b8
Summary: Finding news about the EPO is almost impossible because today’s so-called ‘news’ sites are in the pockets of Benoît Battistelli, António Campinos, and their cohorts who turned the EPO into a hub of litigation, not science; this is part of an international (worldwide) problem because financial resources for journalism have run out, and so the vacuum is filled/replaced almost entirely by Public Relations (PR) and marketing
THIS site of ours has been around for a very long time and it started by focusing on patents (initially it was one particular patent collusion). Back then, in early winter of 2006, there was no lack of press coverage when important things happened. The media was all over the Microsoft-Novell deal (literally hundreds of press articles). One could expect that somebody out there would get assigned to investigate events of interest. I fondly remember those days; almost all the coverage from those days is now offline (broken/changed links, sometimes no copy left online, primarily due to copyright law).
Reading news about patents 10 or 15 years ago was occasionally fun. There were the occasional journalistic works into key matters/subjects like software patents and patent trolls. Sometimes they’d quote some law firm, but it would not dominate the narrative. Back then groups like FFII and the EFF habitually wrote about patents and sought reform. It was possible to actually find information. There was also a balance.
“Reading news about patents 10 or 15 years ago was occasionally fun.”In the past few years, however, as we’ve mentioned many times before, it’s almost impossible to find any real journalism about patents. It’s so rare. And where it does exist it is super shallow, it’s almost like a mildly-edited press release of some company.
In the context of EPO affairs and the UPC, the situation has gotten quite extreme; not only do they dominate the narrative with deliberate lies (disinformation) but they also shout down critics and sometimes delete comments of people whom they do not agree with. The so-called ‘news’ sites about patents are now sponsored and controlled by the litigation ‘industry’ [sic] — the exact same thing which happened to EPO management.
“Last week we said that the World Wide Web is fast becoming nothing but a PR “spamfarm” and the same has become true about important topics in Wikipedia (where there is a lot of money at stake).”Seeing that there is only a slim chance of finding actual news in RSS feeds about patents (Patently-O is now paid and controlled by a patent litigation company that lobbies for software patents), I’ve decided to permanently relegate the reading of news about patents, turning it into a weekend task. I started experimenting with such a cycle about a month ago (for the first time since this site was born) and so far I find that even days later (without watching such news at all) I miss nothing of true value/importance, partly because a lot of what stays on the Web is either false or spammy (like law firms promoting themselves).
Many of the rebuttals are nowadays posted in Daily Links (as editorial comments); writing whole articles of response/rebuttal is very time-consuming and it does not scale well; this seems like a broader trend on the Web. Last week we said that the World Wide Web is fast becoming nothing but a PR "spamfarm" and the same has become true about important topics in Wikipedia (where there is a lot of money at stake). In the video above I used the example of JUVE, which became absolutely terrible in recent years (it has quit pretending to be doing actual news), as explained above in a video with more information/examples to come in Daily Links… █
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