01.05.16
Gemini version available ♊︎The European Patent Office (EPO) Has Become a Propaganda Mill After the FTI Consulting Deal
Summary: Only a few months after the EPO signed the €880,000 FTI Consulting contract there is little coming out of the EPO other than low-quality patents (including software patents) and a lot of self-serving, self-aggrandising propaganda
THERE is nothing but greenwashing this morning from the EPO’s PR department [1, 2]. Even a month later (if not more) they haven’t quite gotten tired of trying to associate EPO patents with ethics, using propaganda which they paid to create.
As Gordon B-P, a British Local Lay Minister, put it yesterday: “Why on earth should a Patent Office need a “PR Team” in the first place? Bizarre…” (in reference to this recent article of ours, as well as the FTI Consulting work)
“IAM’s EPO-friendly ‘magazine’ (also paid indirectly by EPO) is currently organising (with payment from the EPO’s PR agency) a pro-UPC event in the US.”IAM’s EPO-friendly ‘magazine’ (also paid indirectly by EPO) is currently organising (with payment from the EPO's PR agency) a pro-UPC event in the US. Yesterday this ‘magazine’ (paid by the EPO, a proponent of the UPC) kept trying to shame Germany — again! — into UPC endorsement (the last sentence says “Germany seems to have gone very quiet about ratification of the Unified Patent Court”). Is this reporting or advocacy? And if it’s advocacy (similar to PR), then whose? It’s not hard to see what’s going on here…
Yesterday we published a document from the A.C. (Administrative Council) which outlines further crackdowns on EPO staff. Here is a new comment about it which says:
“Some new CA-Docs are out.”
Self-serving and to be expected. “On a proposal from the President,,” nuff said?
This is why many of us (who have been here for a long time – and admittedly – know that it is difficult at this stage of life) are looking for a way out of the shambles that the EPO is becoming.
These people who are running (used jocularly) this place are beyond comprehension – they have no terms of reference – and yet they are given carte blanche. It only makes sense because the people that really count (elected politicians) are not just not interested enough or fail to see the bigger picture.
Luddites had the same problem back in the 18th century,,,,
Watch how the EPO is run; it’s a tyranny, not a democracy, and we know who benefits here. It’s just about as democratic as a corporation (which is inherently anti-democratic, by design). No wonder today’s EPO mostly serves large corporations, even when these corporations aren’t European at all. No wonder today’s EPO gently moves towards allowing software patents in Europe, much to the chagrin of Microsoft, IBM, and so on.
“When I said at 32C3 that “presentation of information” was also under attack, I was right. Graphical User Interfaces patentable in Germany, despite the exclusion of “presentation of information” in the EPC,” Benjamin Henrion wrote today [1, 2] in reference to his recent CCC talk, with link to this article from Bastian Best, who wrote: “Patent applications on new types of GUIs oftentimes run into trouble in Germany because the examiners consider them to be “presentation of information“. As the avid reader will know, the presentation of information is one of the items on the list of subject-matters excluded “as such” from patent protection.”
The EPO isn’t a European institution. It’s international, global, and globalist. It has become abundantly evident that Europe derives almost no value at all from the EPO and the UPC would only make things worse (unless you’re some non-European corporations seeking to sue the whole of Europe in one fell swoop). █
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