Video download link | md5sum 7e85aabf781dae691a2e707de1787fb6 EPO by the Numbers Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works 4.0



Summary: A couple of new papers (or parts of a long paper) reveal an office responsible for granting patents which intentionally fails to do the job properly

THE video above shows that the EPO barely publishes anything anymore, except maybe once a week. The latest fluff (warning: epo.org link) is just misleading two-paragraph propaganda about an illegal and unconstitutional ploy called Unified Patent Court (UPC). With many obstacles ahead, those words won't age well.

But much of the video then deals with Parts 3 and 4 of a multi-part paper (see first and second part) from the staff representatives. It's shown in a hurry (see this [PDF] and that [PDF]). It contains many charts and demonstrates the appalling conditions, which discourage suitably-qualified people from joining the EPO and even just staying at the EPO.

epo.org is still a parade of lies, but it has lost momentum. The EPO itself is an imploding bubble, having granted far too many invalid patents, whose harm will be seen in decades to come.

To quote the The Central Staff Committee's message to staff:

Rewards Exercise 2022: Reduction of the budget and comparing populations

Dear colleagues,

Every July the Office proudly announces the results of the yearly reward exercise. This year was no different, with the Office’s publication concerning the reward exercise of 2022 “Celebrating outstanding achievements with an inclusive approach”. In an effort to improve the transparency of the practice, the annual announcement is accompanied by a document containing the detailed statistics, which provide breakdowns of different divisions of our EPO population. We appreciate having access to the data, since it allows for an analysis of the distribution of the rewards despite being far from complete (i.e. lacking data on functional allowances).

The staff representation has carefully examined the data provided this year and for previous years and has initiated a short series of publications (part 1, part 2) detailing our analysis. The next are:

Part three: Reduction of the budget

Part four: Comparing populations

Over the coming weeks, subsequent editions in this series on the rewards exercise will be published that take a closer look at a number of topics that have given us cause for concern.

Sincerely yours,

The Central Staff Committee - CSC

In the next post we'll show that António Campinos is already being contacted regarding the plan to grant loads of European Patents illegally. ⬆