Patents just flying off the shelf, almost like hotcakes, in spite of brain drain? Sounds like a total catastrophe!
Executives are conventionally judged by year-to-year or quarter-to-quarter performance (temporal basis), so it's widely known that they have an incentive to make things look rosy at the future's expense, knowing that their term's end is approaching anyway. It's a case of "leave the mess for my predecessor to grapple with..."
It's hard to say that Battistelli forgot what patent offices are intended to do and what they are for; it's hard to believe Battistelli ever knew those things... in France they don't even engage in examination of applications. Battistelli, moreover, is not a scientist, so he thinks like some ENA-trained executive.
At the EPO, talent is moving out, pending applications (queued) are running out and will soon necessitate layoffs, and quality of patent assessment/examination is an utter joke, as recent leaks served to reveal (the EPO tried hard to distract from these leaks). The EPO's previous economist warned against this, but the new economist, who is French, is acting like a mouthpiece of Battistelli (based on what he said in recent public events).
"The EPO's previous economist warned against this, but the new economist, who is French, is acting like a mouthpiece of Battistelli (based on what he said in recent public events)."This morning the EPO wrote in Twitter: "Our annual report is out: EPO grants record number of European patents in 2016" (original at epo.org, but it can potentially be used to harvest IP addresses, so a screenshot is shown at the top of our article). Put another way (contrary to the headline): quality of patents at the EPO has nosedived. Insiders keep telling us so; we know for a fact that's true. They basically sort of mock the quality of their own woks, but it's not their fault; the management forces them to do hasty and thus shoddy work.
No word yet about patent quality from the EPO (just numbers), but notice, in the tweet below, that they put the word "quality" in big fonts and first from the left:
https://twitter.com/EPOorg/status/839041801910628352
They obviously wish to distract from the reality -- the fact that patent quality is compromised and the whole "EP" pool is now polluted with questionable patents. This can take decades to undo or revoke; public confidence would be harmed in the meantime and stakeholders are already growing impatient; who wants questionable (vulnerable in a court of law) patents? That is often worse than useless -- a waste of the plaintiff's money (renewal, legal fees, court bills etc.), not just the defendant's money.
"They obviously wish to distract from the reality -- the fact that patent quality is compromised and the whole "EP" pool is now polluted with questionable patents."No words can describe how much damage is done to Europe (not just the EPO) by Battistelli. I as a scientist too am affected by this.
Prior to the release of this bad news (lack of care for the examination process), the EPO wrote this stupid teaser: "Who leads innovation in Europe? EPO releases #annualresults 2016 in < than 24h. Stay tuned! http://buzz.mw/b1wmv_f"
"The EPO is quickly becoming a laughing stock. It's not a people's office but large corporations' office."The fools (or worse -- liars) of EPO management pretend that the number of patents is the same as innovation; that's biased and favourable to rich countries/firms, as we explained here before.
The EPO is quickly becoming a laughing stock. It's not a people's office but large corporations' office. The Twitter account of the EPO is a symptom of this. Here it is speaking about online filing ("Online"=Windows). As indicated by the photo, lots and lots of Microsoft Windows may be involved.
"How do you file a patent with the new online filing application? Learn at this workshop," the EPO stated.
Another new tweet speaks of a so-called "IP Basics kit," which was "Produced by the EPO in co-operation with the European Union Intellectual Property Office" (when do you merge if ever? It would totally render the UPC incompatible with Brexit because of abundantly explicit EU connections). ⬆