02.08.16
Gemini version available ♊︎Latest Propaganda From the EPO’s Management an Effort to Make the EPO the Tool of Megacorporations
Turf wars: Megacorporations typically seek further protectionism for their dominant positions
Summary: A quick roundup of some of the latest spin and paid-for (bought) coverage that helps introduce a distorted patent system whose beneficiaries are not European (or even people)
THE EPO is starting to focus more and more on propaganda and lies [1, 2], as we noted in our previous post. Truth does not support the EPO’s actions, so reality distortion becomes imperative. We are going to spend a lot of today responding to lies disseminated by EPO managers and their unethical PR team.
“The rules are being changed in favour of lawyers’ biggest clients and patent trolls, much to the detriment of Europeans who are not patent lawyers.”There was a reminder on a Sunday (unusual for IAM) of an EPO-funded pro-UPC propaganda event. This one angle of spin is rather telling. The EPO is liaising with patent lawyers in an effort to change the rules. The rules are being changed in favour of lawyers' biggest clients and patent trolls, much to the detriment of Europeans who are not patent lawyers.
The EPO’s PR team finally decided that publishing only in German is rather tasteless (we mentioned it to them), so it now has an English version of an article originally published in German alone (warning: epo.org link), piggybacking a patent maximalist to help glamourise the EPO, as we noted at the time (patent maximalists serve to reinforce the narrative/mythology that more patents necessarily mean more innovation). Here is the EPO’s PR team again taking advantage of cancer on World Cancer Day despite its activities which harm cancer patients.
Several days ago we wrote about EPO price hikes that harm SMEs. Shortly thereafter, as one commenter jokingly put it: “The increased fees are not for patent examination but for essential EPO business like spying on employees and members of the public, buying favorable press reports, organizing inventor of the year events, providing “technical” support to obedient member states, subsidizing private companies like Control Risks or FTI Consulting. To the benefit of European society.”
Does anyone think it’s acceptable for the EPO to waste nearly $1 million (in just a year!) on some US-based PR firm? How about the use of so-called economists to help generate propaganda regarding the economics of patents?
“Regarding examination or not,” one person wrote, “there are several patent systems possible, each with its advantages and drawbacks. But as long as the EPC requires that examination be carried out and as long as the EPO takes a nice fee from the applicants for doing an examination, it is not within mr. Battistelli’s competence, nor within that of the AC, to “take us” to a different system, however modern that may be.”
Battistelli is now lobbying for the UPC, which in no way helps the European SMEs. That’s why FTI Consulting, which is paid by the EPO, now pays publishers for pro-EPO propaganda. As another new comment put it today:
“Isn’t that the cost-saving, modern and efficient way to go? Is that not where BB is taking us all?”
That may well be so.
It’s abundantly clear that he is intent on shutting down the EPO Boards of Appeal.
He has more or less said so publicly on a few occasions or at least it can be read between the lines of some of his propaganda.But the question in the back of many people’s minds is where is his mandate coming from ? Paris ? Brussels ? Washington ?
BB [Battistelli] is not a “visionary”. He is a technocrat. He is implementing somebody else’s vision. But who is or are the puppet-masters pulling his strings ?
Based on leaked documents, Battistelli prioritises large corporations, even foreign ones. Emanating from our work here, including Spanish translations, is some media coverage in Google News and days ago Juve published another article, titled “Kommentar: Warnschuss für EPA-Präsidenten Battistelli” (we kindly ask readers to help us publish an English translation of it). Battistelli and his mob try to ‘revolutionise’ the system at the behest of large multinational corporations, at the expense of Europe. Should they be allowed to get away with it? Why isn’t Parliament stepping in? Silence is complicity in this context. █
“When the mob gains the day it ceases to be any longer the mob. It is then called the nation.”
–Napoleon
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