The latest media strategy on the face of it...

See this classic old article for parallels

Summary: Benoît Battistelli's EPO uses a propaganda strategy which we are very much familiar with (like Microsoft trying to cast other companies, e.g. Google in the Scroogled PR/lobbying campaign, as 'equally evil')

LAST week we warned about the greenwashing spin from the incredibly unpopular EPO (it continues even this week), but a more disturbing spin that we are seeing right now, both in press articles and in mysterious anonymous comments, is that SUEPO is basically "as bad as" (or as violent as, e.g. "armed" "Nazis", "snipers", or Mafia) the EPO's management. That's laughable, but if this kind of spin is repeated often enough, then some people might actually believe it.

"That's laughable, but if this kind of spin is repeated often enough, then some people might actually believe it."We don't know if this is some kind of a plot which came about in boardroom brainstorming with FTI Consulting (a nasty US-based firm that is paid a obscene amount of money from the EPO right now to poison the media), but let's just say that this kind of spin warrants a rebuttal.

Junge Welt published an article on the 11^th of December (Friday), a day after the latest Munich protest, and it is titled “Unrechtsstaat im Staate”. We still hope that a translation will turn up as the article is in German, but we imagine that it also airs the EPO's spin, supposedly for 'balance'.

"Is this related to the EPO's PR campaigns, coinciding with threats to sue publishers?"One person in Twitter says "take some popcorn and enjoy reading the comments" in IP Kat, but as we noted about a week ago, there is an increasingly-distracting element in these anonymous comments. It is discrediting critics of the EPO and distracting readers from the real issues and the real scandals. Is this related to the EPO's PR campaigns, coinciding with threats to sue publishers? Again, we can't tell for sure, but it seems quite probable.

The one downside of comments is that there is no quality control, not even a scoring system. IP Kat has a lot of factually-incorrect comments, usually the pro-EPO ones. Well, we don't want to repost too many comments from there, but there is clearly some kind of spin going on (whether paid-for or gratis), culminating this morning with the following two responses. The first one says (responding to the pro-EPO "nero"):

The "dental non-issue" is only a "non-issue" inside nero's head.

The ostensibly innocuous "top-up insurance" is very clearly a "sweetener" for the members of the smaller Eastern European delegations. The fact that nobody had needed it for the last 40 years and that it was introduced at a time of "austerity" and "cutbacks" (for EPO staff) should be enough to make any objective observer suspicious. Not to mention the fact that it was introduced by VP4 who has quite a reputation as a confectionary expert from his previous career in the Croatian State Intellectual Property Office.

If there really is nothing to hide then I'm sure that we can look forward to publication in due course of the figures of the number of incidents of "urgent dental treatment" of AC members and the costs involved. All in the interests of transparency ...

nero is doing a good job as a presidential sock-puppet but like BB he has obviously never heard of the "Streisand effect".

Here is another:

I am very sad, I would even say exasperated when reading comments that tend to imply that BB and SUEPO are behaving in a similar (bad) manner. This appears to be an absurd attempt to prove that, if BB is behaving in a poor fashion the same applies to the trade union.

Well, may be there are just a couple of heartless persons out there not aware of what is going on at epo. The union SUEPO, set up about 4 decades ago, is committed to defend the interests of the staff and by the very same way the interests of the epo. Remember the epo would be nothing without his highly skilled staff. A couple of persons, team BB, is systematically and fiercely attacking the epo staff. Team BB started with SUEPO, imposing new rules for strikes, for electing Staff reps, then continued harassing sick staff, imposing an infamous " house arrest", and subsequently attacks the benefits of the pensioners and imposes unachievable working conditions for examiners etc....This being just a short list of the "achievements".

Now please tell me, who is behaving in a poor manner?

SUEPO is trying to counter the systematic destruction of the EPO by team Battistelli. In my opinion it his an honourable task for a trade union. As a reward 3 leading members are on the runway to be fired.

Therefore putting the leading team of the epo and the trade union on the same level is mala fide Last but not least: the "non dental issue" is a mere statement of facts: SUEPO didn't write the minutes of the quoted AC session. AC members get free dental treatment. Fact! Whether AC members misuse this benefit is not the point here. Why should they, anyway?

Notice how the pro-EPO snippets are nitpicking the 'dental' issue, which is far from the main scandal anyway. It's not entirely new, either. Florian Müller mentioned it last week when he wrote: "The closest thing to corruption--and "closest" is an overstatement--that I wrote about was that the EPO allegedly pays for the visits of its supervisors (especially those from relatively poor countries) to Munich doctors."

"Watch out for two kinds of very similar spin."This links to something he wrote about it a year ago, titled "European Patent Office pays for health insurance of members of its oversight body, staff union says".

Watch out for two kinds of very similar spin. One is about "similarly bad" arguments from SUEPO and another about "similarly violent" SUEPO. Well, for a number of days now (if not a few weeks), the EPO's spokespeople too have been trying to portray the biggest staff union as aggressive or at least equally aggressive (as the EPO's management), even though its actions are largely reactionary. They're reactions to the management's attacks on staff (humans) and on human rights themselves. ⬆