Abuse Inside the Polish Patent Office (UPRP) - Part II: Turning a Once-Respected Patent Office Into a Circus and Laughing Stock
In Part I we discussed the general background, why this whole thing matters even to people outside Poland, and how this relates to EPO scandals (Poland's delegation protected the white-collar criminal Benoît Battistelli and still protects his corrupt friend, António Campinos).
What happens in UPRP represents what happens in many other places worldwide, including across the EU and in the EPO. As we shall show at a later point, patent "clerks" (or examiners) are overworked and the mission changed. Once championed as masters of their respective sciences or disciplines, they're now being treated like machines and sometimes get replaced by them [1, 2, 3].
It's not legal, but administrators who don't care about the law and don't fear the law would just go ahead and turn things to junk. Social and career climbers ruin everything for personal gain, sometimes political gain (even where the science matters, not politics).
The report that was mentioned in Part I highlights the misuse of public funds for so-called “integration picnics” held during working hours. These meetings, documented photographically, not only reduced the Office's efficiency but also compromised its credibility. They were attended by the President herself and her deputies, i.e. General Director Marcin DOBRUK, Patrycja CZUBKOWSKA, Piotr ZAKRZEWSKI, and Director Justyn ŁOJKO. While costs of these events soared, employee participation declined, symbolising a collapse in morale and institutional credibility.
In the next part we'll talk about privacy failings. At the EPO they broke privacy laws many times and the EU helped cover that up. █