09.25.15

Gemini version available ♊︎

Süddeutsche Zeitung Explains Imminent Federal Scrutiny Against Battistelli’s EPO in Germany

Posted in Europe, Patents at 3:56 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Süddeutsche Zeitung

Summary: The German newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung reveals that actions by the German government may be imminent against the EPO’s cliquish management, including its ringleader Benoît Battistelli

ONE of the papers that most frequently cover the EPO scandals is Süddeutsche Zeitung (recall for example [1, 2, 3, 4, 5]). There is a new article there and it explains that the EPO’s serious privacy infringements are going to come under federal scrutiny, with findings to soon be revealed and probably entail yet more media negative coverage. Using classic diversion techniques, the EPO is still trying to defect and mislead journalists; among the tricks we see fallacies of definition (e.g. “investigation”, “monitoring”, and “filtering” for abusive interrogation that can lead to suicides, mass surveillance and censorship, respectively), circular reasoning, victim-blaming (painting staff protests as the core issue, or characterising these protests as motivated by greed), misuse of the "racism" label (or personification of very broad issues) regarding 'poor' Željko Topić, and construction of one abuse in an effort to cover up previous abuses (recursive, as it leads to an endless chain of abuses that never end). This sort of comedy of errors is guaranteed to end with serious consequences, not just staff suicides but probably high-level staff resignations (saving face before layoffs/firings and/or criminal charges).

“The Süddeutsche Zeitung comments on the lack of supervision of data protection a the European Patent Office,” SUEPO explains, quoting: “The Federal Data Protection Commissioner, Andrea Vosshoff, is seriously concerned about data protection at the European Patent Office (EPO) in Munich, and has made her views known to the Federal Ministry of Justice and the Committee on Legal Affairs of the Bundestag. At the end of September the Federal Government will be issuing a report in committee. This has been prompted by a specific case: In June it became known that spyware had been installed on a computer in an area which was accessible to visitors.”

“Translations in English, French, and Dutch are available by scrolling through the document,” SUEPO added, enclosing this document of which we have made a local copy [PDF], just in case the EPO decides to once again intimidate SUEPO into self-censorship. Here is the English translation of the article:

English translation

European Patent Office Data Protection Commissioner calls for Supervision for Patent Office

17 September 2015, 18:47 hours

European Patent Office Data Protection Commissioner calls for Supervision for Patent Office

By Katja RIEDEL

The Federal Data Protection Commissioner, Andrea Vosshoff, is seriously concerned about data protection at the European Patent Office (EPO) in Munich, and has made her views known to the Federal Ministry of Justice and the Committee on Legal Affairs of the Bundestag. At the end of September the Federal Government will be issuing a report in committee. This has been prompted by a specific case: In June it became known that spyware had been installed on a computer in an area which was accessible to visitors. The background is the deep division between the management of the Office and parts of the staff body, with the involvement of their representative organization, the Suepo Union.

Persons unknown have been distributing communications attacking the President Benoît Battistelli and other high-ranking EPO representatives, and the purpose of the software is supposed to help identify the perpetrators. One patent judge was banned from his post immediately, and critics have viewed this as an impermissible intrusion and exceeding of authority. The incident aroused anger, just as the putative spying campaign did. Critics make the point that the risk of parties not involved at all – staff members, patent judges, or members of the Administrative Council – all have reason to be concerned about the security of their data.

The Bavarian Data Protection Commissioner, Thomas Petri, also sees the need for action. He has called for an independent external data protection supervisory body to be established for the Office. This is an issue involving sensitive and economically valuable data, and intellectual property. Petri has approached the Federal Commissioner Vosshoff. The problem is that the European Patent Organization is a state within a state, with its own laws, and the President has far-reaching rights and powers. The only legal supervisory body to which he has to answer is the Administrative Council, on which the 38 Member States sit. Critics complain that basic rules which apply in Germany cannot be imposed on the EPO. Data Protection Commissioner Vosshoff is demanding that the legal basis of the Patent Organization, the Patent Convention, should be supplemented by an external supervisory arrangement. She has made this proposal to the Ministry of Justice in the letter to the Committee on Legal Affairs, which is in the possession of the Süddeutsche Zeitung. So far, however, the Ministry has rejected the idea on the grounds that the Convention cannot be supplemented without the agreement of all the Member States.

Meanwhile, there is still no peace at the Patent Office. Last week EPO staff were again on the march in Munich, this time to the Labour Inspectorate. The reconciliation procedure which was ordered in the early part of the year, and which began with discussions, appears to have stalled in the interim. The Munich-based Chair of the Union is currently fearful of severe disciplinary measures. Without the approval of the Office management, she made it publicly known in an Internet blog that she was being informed on, internally; this is apparently being viewed as contravention of her obligation to maintain confidentiality. Up to Thursday afternoon, the EPO was making no comment.

There has been a reckless accusation and a shallow presumption about the source of the leak. If people pass things around among colleagues or external entities other than media (sometimes out of necessity, e.g. in the case of lawyers, legal advisers, family and so on), it is possible for the leaker to become someone other than the original recipient of some piece of information. The very fact that the EPO’s management is bullying a person under false pretenses or totally made-up assumptions (reinforced through ferocious repetition in Battistelli's and Bergot's echo chamber) just serves to show the utterly poor investigative skills, even with the addition of ‘British Blackwater’ (CRG) to the team, owing to Battistelli’s signing of the CRG deal, at taxpayers’ expense. The naked emperor has done a good job proving the Streisand Effect and he shows no signs of stopping.

The EPO (meaning its management) is a very rogue, revengeful, misguided body that is willing to even bully innocent people rather than interrogate members of the management, who are themselves facilitators of serious crimes, thankfully (for them) managing to break and/or dodge European laws at nearly every turn.

We do need an investigative unit. It needs to investigate EPO management and it must be completely external/independent from the EPO, which has been systematically subverted from the inside as if the EPO is a private company with just one shareholder, Mr. Battistelli.

“That’s why I am president!”Benoît Battistelli arrogantly exclaimed

Share in other sites/networks: These icons link to social bookmarking sites where readers can share and discover new web pages.
  • Reddit
  • email

Decor ᶃ Gemini Space

Below is a Web proxy. We recommend getting a Gemini client/browser.

Black/white/grey bullet button This post is also available in Gemini over at this address (requires a Gemini client/browser to open).

Decor ✐ Cross-references

Black/white/grey bullet button Pages that cross-reference this one, if any exist, are listed below or will be listed below over time.

Decor ▢ Respond and Discuss

Black/white/grey bullet button If you liked this post, consider subscribing to the RSS feed or join us now at the IRC channels.

DecorWhat Else is New


  1. Links 06/06/2023: Angie 1.2.0, New EasyOS and EndeavourOS Released

    Links for the day



  2. Gemini Links 06/06/2023: OpenKuBSD, GrapheneOS, and More

    Links for the day



  3. Links 06/06/2023: OpenSUSE Plans for Leap

    Links for the day



  4. Gemini Links 06/06/2023: Bubble 4.0, Neutral News, and Older Bits

    Links for the day



  5. IBM's War on Open (Look at the Pattern of Layoffs at Red Hat)

    By abandoning OpenSource.com and OpenOffice.org/LibreOffice IBM sends out a clear signal that it doesn’t understand or simply does not care about the community of Free software users; its siege against the FSF and other institutions never ended and today we look at who’s being laid off or shown the door (the work environment is intentionally being made worse)



  6. Links 06/06/2023: IceWM 3.4.0 and Liveslak 1.7.0

    Links for the day



  7. Gemini Links 06/06/2023: Apple Might Kill VR, Tea Tea Deluxe 1.2.7 and Tea Land

    Links for the day



  8. IRC Proceedings: Monday, June 05, 2023

    IRC logs for Monday, June 05, 2023



  9. Links 05/06/2023: Debian 12 Almost Ready, Hong Kong 'Cannot' Remember Tiananmen Massacre

    Links for the day



  10. Gemini Links 05/06/2023: New Ship in Cosmic Voyage, Stack Overflow Moderator Strike

    Links for the day



  11. IRC Proceedings: Sunday, June 04, 2023

    IRC logs for Sunday, June 04, 2023



  12. Links 04/06/2023: Unifont 15.0.05 and PCLinuxOS Stuff

    Links for the day



  13. Gemini Links 04/06/2023: Wayland and the Old Computer Challenge

    Links for the day



  14. StatCounter: GNU/Linux (Including ChromeOS) Grows to 8% Market Share Worldwide

    This month’s numbers from StatCounter are good for GNU/Linux (including ChromeOS, which technically has both GNU and Linux); the firm assesses logs from 3 million sites and shows Windows down to 66% in desktops/laptops (a decade ago it was above 90%) with modest growth for GNU/Linux, which is at an all-time high, even if one does not count ChromeOS that isn’t freedom- or privacy-respecting



  15. Journalism Cannot and Quite Likely Won't Survive on the World Wide Web

    We’re reaching the point where the overwhelming majority of new pages on the Web (the World Wide Web) are basically junk, sometimes crafted not by humans; how to cope with this rapid deterioration is still an unknown — an enigma that demands hard answers or technical workarounds



  16. Do Not Assume Pensions Are Safe, Especially When Managed by Mr. EPOTIF Benoît Battistelli and António Campinos

    With the "hoax" that is the financial assessment by António Campinos (who is deliriously celebrating the inauguration of illegal and unconstitutional kangaroo courts) we urge EPO workers to check carefully the integrity of their pensions, seeing that pension promises have been broken for years already



  17. Links 04/06/2023: Why Flatpak and Wealth of Devices With GNU/Linux

    Links for the day



  18. Gemini Links 04/06/2023: Rosy Crow 1.1.3 and NearlyFreeSpeech.NET

    Links for the day



  19. IRC Proceedings: Saturday, June 03, 2023

    IRC logs for Saturday, June 03, 2023



  20. Links 04/06/2023: Azure Outage Again (So Many!) and Tiananmen Massacre Censored

    Links for the day



  21. Links 03/06/2023: Qubes OS 4.2.0 RC1 and elementaryOS Updates for May

    Links for the day



  22. Gemini Links 03/06/2023: Hidden Communities and Exam Prep is Not Education

    Links for the day



  23. Links 03/06/2023: IBM Betraying LibreOffice Some More (After Laying off LibreOffice Developers)

    Links for the day



  24. Gemini Links 03/06/2023: Bubble Woes and Zond Updates

    Links for the day



  25. Links 03/06/2023: Apache NetBeans 18 and ArcaOS 5.0.8

    Links for the day



  26. IRC Proceedings: Friday, June 02, 2023

    IRC logs for Friday, June 02, 2023



  27. The Developing World Abandons Microsoft Windows, GNU/Linux at All-Time Highs on Desktops/Laptops

    Microsoft, with 80 billion dollars in longterm debt and endless layoffs, is losing the monopolies; the media doesn’t mention this, but some publicly-accessible data helps demonstrate that



  28. Links 02/06/2023: Elive ‘Retrowave’ Stable and Microsoft's Half a Billion Dollar Fine for LinkeIn Surveillance in Europe

    Links for the day



  29. Linux Foundation 'Research' Has a New Report and Of Course It Uses Only Proprietary Software

    The Linux Foundation has a new report, promoted by Clickfraud Spamnil and others; of course they’re rejecting Free software, they’re just riding the “Linux” brand and speak of “Open Source” (which they reject themselves)



  30. Links 02/06/2023: Arti 1.1.5 and SQL:2023

    Links for the day


RSS 64x64RSS Feed: subscribe to the RSS feed for regular updates

Home iconSite Wiki: You can improve this site by helping the extension of the site's content

Home iconSite Home: Background about the site and some key features in the front page

Chat iconIRC Channel: Come and chat with us in real time

Recent Posts