Bonum Certa Men Certa

The Patent Distortion: 7 Days of News and Blogs, Not a Single Mention of EPO Affairs

Video download link | md5sum bdf313b64a78d62522de60cbab65bbd2 EPO Media Blackout Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works 4.0



Summary: As we expected throughout this past week, not a single site has mentioned the EPO's strike except SUEPO and the European Federation of Public Service Unions (EPSU) and it's part of a long-lasting pattern of what we're calling the "EPO Media Blackout" [1, 2, 3]

THERE'S just over a day left before the strike at the EPO and the media is certainly not mentioning any of that anywhere. In the video above I show hours of searching and browsing.



"Generally speaking, finding meaningful news about patents is hard and anything concerning the EPO is flattery and shameless self-promotion."IP Kat has published no articles about patents in over 3 weeks already. Kluwer Patent Blog wrote just two paragraphs in 12 days (combined! That's just one paragraph per week!) and Patent Docs is mostly ads. The EPO.org puff pieces have said nothing about the UPC/A for several weeks and the UPC lobby has lost most of its momentum by now.

Generally speaking, finding meaningful news about patents is hard and anything concerning the EPO is flattery and shameless self-promotion. Along the way I stumble upon several articles about the COVID-19 patent waiver ("Activists Say New 'Compromise' on IP Waiver for Covid Vaccines Is Worse Than No Deal" is the article I instead allude to).

"Artificial scarcities or monopolies are generally detrimental, but they've become part of the overall "Patent Distortion" (the theme of this ongoing series)."The patent bubbles and the cartels harm millions of people whose lives will perish just to keep the price of medicine artificially high. Guess whose side Benoît Battistelli and António Campinos are on. Guess whose side media has taken. Or whose money it chose for advancing some particular agenda. Artificial scarcities or monopolies are generally detrimental, but they've become part of the overall "Patent Distortion" (the theme of this ongoing series).

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