12.13.15
Keeping the European Patent Office (EPO) Out of Politics Amid the EPO’s Campaign to Deceive the Media, Politicians
Summary: The EPO is still — as for at least a decade beforehand — lobbying politicians and trying to manipulate the media (which politicians read) for a manufactured sense of legitimacy
THE President of the EPO has been doing some UPC lobbying recently (including unbelievably shallow puff pieces with so-called 'correspondents' who read from a pro-EPO script). It’s just part of a recent trend; we recently showed other examples of EPO lobbying for the Unitary Patent [1, 2], playing into the hands of large multinational organisations, not European citizens.
Looking around for some history on this, this is not exactly a new practice. Segolene Royal, French socialist candidate to the Presidency (2007), mentioned EPO lobbying in her answer to a series of questions:
Son activité dégage également des excédents mais avec l’avantage supplémentaire pour lui qu’aucun État ne vient les ponctionner. Ces excédents lui permettent de financer des professionnels des relations publiques pour influencer les choix du Parlement Européen.
Jonas Maebe, FFII Board Member, wrote in a letter to MEPs during the debate on the software patent directive:
The EPO lobbying politicians to promote software patents is a bit like some Department of Housing promoting the handing out of more building permits. We hope our letter and its annexes can give MEPs more balanced information than the EPO’s simplistic oneliners like “Idea + Patent = Innovation”. Economic policy making should not be based on unfounded claims by the EPO and emotional pleas by its largest customers, but on sound economic evidence and the desires of the involved sectors as a whole.
In our previous posts we showed some EPO material being disseminated too; was this distributed in the European Parliament? Outside of it too? What’s the context for all this lobbying if not software patents (at the time)? One small group of people that we know said it was “concerned that the EPO has become like a big business. Did you know that the EPO keeps an office in Brussels, just so that it can lobby the Commission, and Parliament? Did you know that the EPO places full-page adverts in magazines that MEPs read, promoting software patents?”
The matter of fact is, the EPO wants to expand its scope of influence and power. Broadening patent scope is one way to accomplish this. Becoming a vassal of massive multinationals is another.
According to D Young & Co’s new puff piece about the EPO, “an Adobe PDF file [can] to be converted into editable form or typed into a Microsoft Word document” and given to the EPO (remember that Microsoft is a special partner of the EPO, so no ODF file is likely to be accepted).
As we did back in the Novell days, we now have lots of trackers on the EPO, helping us quickly identify cases of EPO lobbying and manipulation of the media. We are going to try to inform journalists whom we believe got bamboozled or exploited by the EPO. There is a massive PR campaign going on right now. █
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