Back to medieval mentality and censorship of truth about questionable statistics
Summary: The European Patent Office (EPO), desperate to save face while patent applications cease to be properly examined, turns to post-truth "alternative facts" and outright distortion of numbers
THE IMAGE above helps explain the atmosphere among EPO workers, who are unable to grasp why their managers would lie so blatantly and so much. Wasn't the EPO supposed to be a friend of researchers, as it last proclaimed yesterday? Doesn't the EPO value proper research and statistics? Well, judging by how it presented the latest 'results', Battistelli's EPO is overtly anti-scientific and hostile towards facts/truth. Recall the following posts from last month (among more):
Not even the
USPTO ever resorted to such shameless lies. How does the EPO expect to maintain or earn respect? As testament to the unpopularity of the EPO, recall
this Juve survey. How unpopular is the EPO these days? Watch the EPO's forums, which were last
promoted earlier today by the EPO; Not a single forum post/reply in 4 days! Most forums have been entirely untouched since 2016 (if not earlier years). It's abandoned. It's a ghost town.
What about EPO news? Nothing. Almost nothing for at least a week, except the occasional brag (usually press releases) about patents that should never have been granted, such as
this one from today. It says: "According to the EPO, the patent will formally grant on May 10, 2017. The EPO’s decision to grant this patent follows its March 24, 2017 notice of intent to issue the patent, which was not challenged by any third party. This European patent will be nationalized in, and cover, approximately forty European countries, including Germany, Italy, France, Spain and the Netherlands. As provided by relevant European legislation, third parties will have nine months from the issue date to oppose the patent in the EPO."
This was bundled together with all sorts of other new articles about CRISPR, e.g. [
1,
2,
3,
4,
5,
6,
7], but none mentioned the EPO. The very fact that the EPO is willing to grant monopolies on genome
makes the EPO look worse than ever (even the USPTO denies such patents). Will any staff of DG3 remain at Haar in order to bury this bogus patent as soon as possible?
Battistelli has done everything he could to ensure they're paralysed and unable to demonstrate (and thus object to) the chronic decline in patent quality.
The above image contains all the English text.
This "unbelievable statistical manipulation from management," as someone put it, shows the management "converting 54% into 7.73%."
The two passages written in German say:
"If the renowned legal journal JUVE reports that 54% of industry representatives are no longer happy with the quality of our patent process, then we should be worried" and "
at the end of November 2016 JUVE surveyed the patent departments of 168 international technology companies... 24 companies completely answered the survey, a response rate of 14.3 percent" (translation errors may still be possible).
For those who have watched the EPO closely over the past few years and especially the past few months, such lies would not seem too shocking. They've lost all credibility. Earlier today
the EPO wrote: "The world's most inventive minds come together for a celebration of their achievements on 15 June." (link to
epo.org/learning-events/european-inventor.html)
One might expect scientists to attend, but even
reckless frauds are coming and receiving awards. Not to mention Battistelli,
whose awards come from himself...
Fraudsters as "inventors"?
Lies as "statistics" and "research"?
Assembly line as "science"?
This is really characteristic of everything that is wrong with the EPO these days. The boss of the EPO has no scientific background at all and he only started flirting with so-called 'IP' 10 years before his retirement age.
⬆
