IAM spoon-feeds Battistelli annually

Summary: While the EPO is collapsing due to mismanagement the boosters of Team Battistelli would rather deflect and speak about Brexit, which is itself partly motivated by such mismanagement

THE EPO is in trouble. Ignore the spin which is known as "Annual Report" and does not take into account depletion of work (layoffs will come soon, quite inevitably, for the first time ever). EPO recruitment of Brits had gone down by 80% and the UPC isn't coming (for about half a dozen very important reasons, not just Brexit); the German press too now joins the British press (3 articles so far) in talking about the petition regarding patent quality (new article by Stefan Krempl, who is familiar with EPO affairs).

Thorsten Bausch has just published the last part of his series called "The EPO’s Vision," in which he says: "...we need to talk about (a) the intended task or purpose and (b) the extent to which time or effort is well used, when a patent is searched and examined by the European Patent Office" (EPO).

"Amid all this, the patent trolls' lobby (IAM) bemoans the UK's lack of participation in the EPO, having been paid by the EPO's PR agency to promote the UPC."As we said over the weekend, the European Patent Office ceased being a patent office; it's more like a patent-printing machine now, unregulated and reckless beyond belief. Staff is suffering while management (executives) floods its own bank accounts. It's utterly despicable and it doesn't look like European authorities intend to do anything.

Amid all this, the patent trolls' lobby (IAM) bemoans the UK's lack of participation in the EPO, having been paid by the EPO's PR agency to promote the UPC. The editor of IAM wrote yesterday: "If you do incline to this view, patent data backs you up. Take, for example, the European Patent Office’s recently released annual report for 2017. This showed that UK-based entities accounted for just 3% of applications the office received last year. That put the UK in seventeenth position in terms of patent applications per million of population."

"...EPO scandals contribute to anti-EU sentiments -- whether justifiably or not -- and those who care about the Union should do a lot more to tackle EPO abuses."Further down he says "we all know that patents do not equate to innovation." (but IAM does often say so, equating patents to innovation)

Either way, the point of this IAM post was to express that same old dissatisfaction over Brexit (to be clear, I am strongly against Brexit too) and having watched this closely over the past couple of years, it seems clear that their motivations aren't quite the same as everybody's. In fact, the clear absence of coverage about EPO scandals says a lot. Had IAM been objective (which it clearly isn't; check its lists of sponsors), it would realise that EPO scandals contribute to anti-EU sentiments -- whether justifiably or not -- and those who care about the Union should do a lot more to tackle EPO abuses. ⬆