Mobbing at the European Patent Office (EPO) - Part III - Who's Going to Pay for the EPO's Corruption? (Aside From European Citizens)
[Also see Part I and Part II for some additional background]
For over a decade now (almost 2 decades already!), under Benoît Battistelli and António Campinos (two friends who don't know patents but know how to rob a patent office), the EPO robbed or plundered Europe by giving illegal monopolies to American oligarchs (granting patents that should never have been granted to companies that compete against Europe, besiege Europe, and put back doors in Europeans' computer systems and infrastructure).
Who's gonna pay for it? All of us in Europe.
See, I already lost a lot of money due to SLAPPs from Americans, but I also have friends in Europe who lost endless money (or even businesses) because of American patent trolls or American corporations that casually (and secretly) issue extortionate letters to European companies.
This is a problem that doesn't often see light in mainstream media - the very same media that looks the other way when the EPO has strikes and when obvious corruption is happening at the Office.
As it turns out, the EPO assigned to media affairs an actual cocaine addict (who unlike his colleagues does it in public, too).
Unless or until we tackle the core issues at the Office, we'll continue to suffer from European software patents - i.e. patents which are both illegal and undesirable.
Some people inside the EPO reached out to us. They told us about the cocaine addicts, the mobbing, the racism, and other institutional abuses. The problem is attributed to "Team Campinos" or the "Alicante Mafia" - a problem which is getting out of hand. It is only ever exacerbating as experienced (older) staff leaves.
At the moment, the least qualified people are in charge of the Office. Quoting Wikipedia on this phenomenon:
The Dunning–Kruger effect is the tendency of people with low ability in a specific area to give overly positive assessments of this ability. This is often seen as a cognitive bias, that is, a systematic tendency to engage in erroneous forms of thinking and judging. In the case of the Dunning–Kruger effect, the systematic error concerns people with low skill in a specific area trying to evaluate their competence within this area and their tendency to greatly overestimate their competence.
So people who never worked with patents prior to being put in charge of Europe's largest patent office have managed to fool themselves into thinking that they do a great job. Cocaine can help reinforce this belief. █
Image source: A Creditor Visit