03.29.16

Gemini version available ♊︎

Crisis Deepens at the European Patent Office, General Strike Planned for Next Thursday

Posted in Europe, Patents at 3:12 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Title of the strike will be “Lawfulness at the EPO”

Willy Minnoye caricature

Summary: The European Patent Office (EPO), where Battistelli continues to serve (at least until June), continues to lose whatever is left of the reputation which took many decades to earn

Dr. Hans-Joachim Frieling from Munich blasts the EPO today. I’m far from fluent in German, but it’s clear that the EPO‘s lawlessness is becoming common knowledge in Bavaria. Even Bavarian politicians now take action against that [1, 2].

How did the EPO become a laughing stock and increasingly synonymous with abuse? Well, just look at EPO management. A fish rots from the head down, starting from Battistelli and further down to his confidants (mostly French), scandalous people such as Željko Topić, and people who take pride in being above the law (Willy Minnoye).

“How did the EPO become a laughing stock and increasingly synonymous with abuse?”Having watched some EPO-related matters over the long weekend (Easter), we found that an EPO patent on “sensoric imprinting [...] had been opposed at the EPO after grant,” which means that the examination process went awry. Well, speeding up examination for particular companies can’t help, can it?

“The EPO Boards of Appeal recently decided a case involving food products for infants,” said this article, “where it considered that the requirement “up to the hilt” in relation to prior art equated to “beyond reasonable doubt” rather than “absolute certainty”.”

Remember that Battistelli not only wishes to crush the boards but also breaks the rules in an effort to scare them all. “Three cheers for the stabilising effect on patent law in Europe,” wrote one patent lawyer today, “of the enormous accumulated specialist wisdom of the Enlarged Board of Appeal of the EPO. Long may it reign.”

“Battistelli just keeps lying to the media about the situation (unless he’s in total denial about it, in which case he’s wrong, not lying).”Battistelli’s messengers in Twitter carry on as if nothing is wrong, even though the Board says there is a crisis and a staff survey serves to confirm/reaffirm this. “We understand EPO staff are likely to strike on April 7,” MIP (Managing IP) told me this morning (citing Techrights too).

Expect the EPO to say nothing at all about this, either in Twitter or in its own site. Battistelli just keeps lying to the media about the situation (unless he’s in total denial about it, in which case he’s wrong, not lying). Here one can see the EPO repeating discredited figures [1, 2, 3] over at Twitter during Easter and right afterward. Well, “the absence of usable EPO statistics makes it difficult to see what is going on,” one comment said earlier today. Another person wrote: “Simply sad to see how the EPO is going into the wall. [...] quality standard that made the reputation of the EPO…”

“Judging by the EPO’s push towards UPC, maybe Europe will have its own Eastern District of Texas pretty soon.”One recent tweet from the EPO said, “Ask yourself the vital question: “Is there enough evidence to justify taking my idea any further?””

The term “taking my idea any further” just means paying tens of thousands of euros (or hundreds of thousands if the process doesn’t go smoothly, as per stories we covered before), plus renewal fees, for a patent that’s probably a waste of time and money. Companies that say they need patents to attract investors must be looking at the wrong places for investors (maybe in Texas).

Judging by the EPO’s push towards UPC, maybe Europe will have its own Eastern District of Texas [1, 2] pretty soon. We shall cover the UPC separately in our next post.

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