Latest SUEPO (Staff Union of EPO) Report For The Hague Reveals EPO Does Not Obey Court Orders, Refuses to Allow Workers to Freely Talk to One Another
The Hague has even bigger EPO scandals which moreover implicate the Dutch government as co-conspirator
IMAGINE working in a place where communication itself is restricted, even outside the workplace. My last employer tried (in vain) to do this, especially in recent years, and according to the 2022 report from SUEPO [1, 2, 3], which is only a few months old having been finalised and authorised in October, there is still refusal to allow staff representatives to freely communicate with staff, still citing "privacy" (which is ironic given how much EPO management violates privacy).
How can examiners work, knowing that communication itself is at risk or peril? Is truth itself verboten? We have thousands of smart and honest examiners asking themselves, by granting this European Patent to a non-European mega-corporation that spies on European citizens, whose interests are served? "European competitiveness"? How so? Only about a third of European Patents go to Europeans and that usually means some large European corporations, not individuals and SMEs (the names of people on patents don't mean those people "own" them; the employer does). This advances monopolies and thus inequality, not science and technology. Examiners with scientific background and university degrees understand this better than EPO managers with some unrelated degree or some MBA or a lawyers' licence. Ignore buzzwords like "investment" or "innovation"; they vomit out those words any time a real, substantial question is raised.
Impeding communication means undermining much-needed challenges, proactively. Questioning things isn't allowed. The EPO has its share of 'Navalnies'.
What's needed right now at the EPO is open discussion, but instead, as per the above report, we find the following:
Freedom of communication – mass emailsA short note on the access to mass email: with Judgment 45515 the Tribunal ruled against the EPO’s policy on effectively forbidding mass email to staff committees and SUEPO and lifted all limitations.
However, the discussion on mass e-mails has been taking an adventurous path. The data protection officer built up a tortuous reasoning linked to the data protection rules. The result is that since the Communiqué N°26 “When enough is enough – the use of mass emails within the Office” implemented as of June 2013, both the Staff Representation and SUEPO continues without access to mass e-mails. Applications for execution are currently pending before ILO
You would expect this from Putin's Russia.
Any civilised country would be shocked to see that Europe has become this corrupt and the EPO's corruption has already metastasised in the EU.
There's lots more in this report and some of these issues were also covered in the recent General Assembly.
People deserve to have a real discussion about what goes on at the understaffed EPO, where the real salary decreases over time while Benoît Battistelli and António Campinos line their pockets (along with their buddies, multiplying the graft) and gamble away the EPO's cash repositories, which weren't even meant to exist and do exist because the EPO just grants loads of illegal (invalid, not compliant) European Patents, including software patents. We have lots more news about patents, including European Patents, in our Daily Links (which are sometimes bi-daily) and it looks like patents granted by the EPO aren't doing too well in courts, except the illegal kangaroo courts.
The world now depends on honest patent examiners who refuse to blindly "obey orders" for "Major Applicants" such as Microsoft. █