WE ALREADY know that Benoît Battistelli's EPO has escalated its war on information to threats or retaliation against publishers, potentially impacting some of the world's largest.

"What does this say about the EPI?"As recently as one day ago the EPI presented criticism of the EPO (shown above, except the older enclosed PDF and the latest PDF). Well, the EPI has just removed its criticism of the EPO from its site (we also tested the CMS to ensure that this was definitely a deletion and not some technical error). What does this say about the EPI? Did the EPO get in touch? Perhaps some members? Why the sudden self-censorship?

We first became aware of this because of the following comment that said: "There is a very strange new trend of webpages suddenly disappearing. I just turned up the following in a Google Search... And then I went and clicked on the link: http://patentepi.com/de/epi/news/24 And what did I get [...] An Error Occurred... The server returned a "404 Not Found"... Something is broken. Please let us know what you were doing when this error occurred. We will fix it as soon as possible. Sorry for any inconvenience caused. "

"Sadly for EPI, self-censorship or attempts to censor another party often have the opposite (and undesirable to the censor) effect."A later comment pointed to Google cache and another comment said: "Here you are. Google does not forget..."

Sadly for EPI, self-censorship or attempts to censor another party often have the opposite (and undesirable to the censor) effect. We wouldn't be shocked if, now that people publicly embarrass the EPI and restore the deleted page by making mirrors/copies, the EPI itself will put it back online and pretend it was all just an accident (this is a common face-saving routine). ⬆