03.05.16
Despite Its Propaganda Campaign (‘Union Recognition’ and ‘Results’) the EPO’s Management is Totally Flipping Out
Summary: The statement above (released at the end of Friday) is telling in the sense that it serves to confirm that the management of the EPO is freaking out
THE top-level management of the EPO is collapsing, in spite of the FTI Consulting contract and all these ridiculous publicity stunts. Expect heads to roll pretty soon.
“The EPO’s leadership is freaking out, not because there’s falsehood but because managers there are being cast negatively, for their horrible treatment of their staff.”The TV program broadcast a few days ago apparently got Battistelli all hellish and even got Willy annoyed. Just appeared on the Intranet was the message above and it’s really quite revealing. The EPO’s leadership is freaking out, not because there’s falsehood but because managers there are being cast negatively, for their horrible treatment of their staff. What are the “appropriate steps” then? Sending more threatening legal letters to people? They already seem to have done that to some Germans, based on the wrong name in the first legal letter sent to me.
No doubt the EPO can do nothing about the above except try hard to distract journalists. Some companies brag about EPO patents in self-promotional pieces, but surely nobody (among journalists) will pay attention. So what can the EPO do? Well, there is new propaganda in video form (almost nobody has watched this). It presents the twisted ‘facts’ that are not actually facts and the EPO’s Twitter account works ‘overtime’ only to show that most EPO patent applications don’t actually come from Europe (foreign companies are prioritised). We studied this very closely and did a detailed media survey; we can say that the EPO failed pretty badly with the spin. Some sites just link to other articles rather than write their own and few obscure sites in English pretend that patents and innovation are the same thing in order to come up with misleading headlines. It’s revealing that they willingly got bamboozled by EPO, presumably the PR team. It’s almost like ghostwriting. Consider this article which says: “The patent office said the total number of applications it received rose to 160,022, up 4.8%, and the highest ever number.”
Well, this isn’t true. Many of these applications don’t even make it to the doorstep, as we pointed out before. All these latest articles focus on Switzerland and The Local too continues this propaganda campaign, this time for the EPO (again). WIPR too wrote about this, but it didn’t fact-check. These numbers from EPO are not correct as many of these ‘applications’ never make it to the footstep at the EPO.
When will journalists finally accept that the EPO lies to journalists or twists the facts enough for them to be called liars? Ignore the stream of propaganda. The EPO works not for European companies (for the most part), so what’s in it for Europe?
“The patent office said…”
–WIPRAnother pattern of propaganda which we noticed could be found in Dutch media the other day. Petra Kramer gave us the following translation:
European Patent Office recognizes union
From our editor
Wednesday, March 2nd, 2016, 17:26
Update: Yesterday, 07:34Newspaper Title: “The European Patent Office recognizes a union for the first time’
The European Patent Office (EPO) has given a union the status of social partner for the first time . This should open the way to improving labour relations, which have deteriorated due to a conflict between the EPO boss Benoit Battistelli and part of the staff.
The Frenchman Battistelli has been under fire for some time because he is accused of conducting a reign of terror. According to the Battistelli himself at the core of the conflict are his efforts to increase the productivity of the organization, which he claims are necessary to process a growing number of patent applications. In doing so, he would step on many toes.
Interlocutor
Battistelli now appears to be slowing down. The European union FFPE gets recognition as an official interlocutor. The union, according to insiders is also to be included within the Treaty rules of the EPO, which would be unique for an international organization.
But it is a union with very few members within the patent office. Battistelli especially is engaged in a hard fight with Suepo, the union which is furious about the resignation of two of its EPO-staff members.
Rijswijk
The conflict has a strong Dutch dimension, because EPA has a large office in Rijswijk with 2,700 employees. In January this year, several hundred workers demonstrated in The Hague against the regime of their employer.
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[PK: Human-corrected machine translation of: http://fd.nl/economie-politiek/1141876/octrooibureau-erkent-vakbond Paywalled but if you google the headline “Europees octrooibureau erkent vakbond” and don’t have cookies from the Dutch edition of the Financial Times you should be able to get access for free. If not, Google cache is your friend.]
This is just a load of nonsense. Not many in the English-speaking media fell for it and we are going to tackle the subject again in a future post, having patiently studied a lot of documents about the role of the FFPE. █
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