THE patents granted by the EPO are very troublesome. This past week we spotted a number of European software patents in the headlines. In some cases they're used to hunt down companies for "protection money"; sometimes those patents get tossed out. No doubt a lot of today's European Patents are of dubious quality and questionable validity. Two political figures, Benoît Battistelli and António Campinos, are largely responsible for this. They replaced science and substance with litigation and buzzwords/pseudoscience.
"The real innovation is exploiting a biological hazard to justify canning the principles of due process and the right to appear before judges/juries."They do plenty of greenwashing (e.g. "greentech" as the EPO likes to say), "white coat" PR (de facto costumes other than suits; Bill Gates loves doing that, strutting around like he's some famous scientist even though he never even graduated from college, where he didn't even study science), and stunts associated with mere proximity, e.g. status by association or inherited status in EIA, where career-climbing politicians and lying opportunistic autocrats pose for photo ops, even posthumously taking credit for the work of dead scientists because they attended their festival for some award (a PR stunt for the "innovation" posturing).
Some of those points are brought up in the above video, which mostly discusses the latest article from Dr. Thorsten Bausch (Hoffmann Eitle). He, unlike many who write about the EPO, is an actual scientist and he cares about what is true, he's examining the underlying facts, unlike his government.
Sadly, many people who become the public faces of science aren't scientists themselves but a bunch of businessmen and plutocrats. Take for example Al Gore. Contrary to what some people say, he never claimed that he invented the Internet (providing money or laying infrastructural foundations isn't the same thing). Contrary to what Campinos wants people to think, he didn't bring any innovation to the EPO. He took that away. He's outsourcing everything to Microsoft, in effect leaving no actual innovation 'in-house'. He sold the institution to a military contractor from America. As for misleading claims he makes about "ViCo", historically the connection speeds were the main barrier to teleconferencing, bringing rise to the need for compression, packet sequencing/re-ordering, image/video interpolation, and real-time streaming methods that are robust to disruption and varying speeds, among other unforeseen conditions. Nowadays those are mostly tackled/mitigated/solved by brute force and fibre-optics etc. No real innovation in "ViCo" itself, but who cares about facts...
The real innovation is exploiting a biological hazard to justify canning the principles of due process and the right to appear before judges/juries. Is this innovation or a hack? It certainly does not seem lawful. This is what we get in Europe because professional liars seized positions of power -- positions they now grossly misuse to corrupt the media, distort the scientific fields and so on (e.g. scholars being given bribes; this isn't science but business exploitation of the perception of science, like claims of evidence- or fact(s)-based "research" that's commissioned/sponsored just to justify a business objective centered around patent litigation).
As usual, the article from Dr. Bausch is decent (he's very concerned about what's happening in his country) and comments too are mostly insightful. As one person put it: “Staff representatives are “consulted” after the decisions have been taken and are invited to shut up if they dare not give their blessing to all the measures concocted by the president and its minions.”
Prior to that it says: “I find it therefore more important to send amicus curiae briefs in G 1/21 than to comment on the “New Normal”. The whole “consultation” on the “New Normal” is simply farcical...”
As someone else noted, “will those savings instead be distributed to senior management and the member states (at the same time as imagined, future shortfalls are used as an excuse to further drive down staff benefits and to pursue yet more “efficiency” savings)?”
Rhetorical question. Ask EPO staff. There's heated discussion in some recent comments in IP Kat as well. Dr. Bausch takes note of that. ⬆