Summary: The EPO's 'communication' campaign is coming along nicely, with staff that is unable (not allowed) to criticise the EPO's nefarious agenda, writers that are are indirectly paid by the EPO, and opportunistic patent lawyers that encircle the system like hungry vultures

"In stark contrast to this," wrote one commenter today, "is the proposal of the European patent Office to forbid all former employees to continue their lives with a job in IP, pensioners and younger employees alike."

Well, EPO patent examiners can, as Florian Müller pointed out last year, start a long and fulfilling career outside the field of so-called 'IP' (misnomer for patents as IP is a vague term that alludes to all sorts of things).

"Come on now," one person responded to the above. "not all former employees. If you are a buddy of BB [Battistelli] then you'll be all right ... no restrictions will apply."

Remember our recent discovery about prohibitions on free speech by some former EPO staff. Team Battistelli has been actively trying to suppress messages contrary to its agenda, including the UPC. Even people who leave the EPO are being subjected to gags. One might expect it from history's most oppressive regimes; well, that's the EPO.

"Team Battistelli has been actively trying to suppress messages contrary to its agenda, including the UPC.""In a nutshell," this one new article claimed today, "the new Spanish Patents Act will introduce a number of changes, both in prosecution and enforcement proceedings." No mention of the UPC, which the Spanish historically resisted (and the Spanish language is being discriminated against -- a subject of future articles of ours).

Will the UPC ever become a reality at all? That's still an uncertainty, but Battistelli and patent lawyers try to induce defeatism by stating that it's inevitable and just a matter of time. Germany is still not accepting it, so the EPO's mouthpieces at IAM keep trying to shame it into it (we gave another example of it earlier today). There are even worse things going on at IAM at the moment^*.

The German Parliament unambiguously opposes software patents, yet German patent lawyers pretend not to be seeing these unambiguous statements. They hope to exploit confusion and expand the scope of patents, though they're even disputed by other patent lawyers [1, 2, 3, 4].

"Will the UPC ever become a reality at all? That's still an uncertainty, but Battistelli and patent lawyers try to induce defeatism by stating that it's inevitable and just a matter of time."Not only in Twitter do we find these patent boosters, who are almost always patent lawyers. "I cover intellectual property issues to prevent IP horror stories," wrote this one writer today. It's just patent propaganda from a so-called ‘IP’ person at the billionaires’ propaganda mill, Forbes. This is just a bunch of patent lawyers and 'IP' people having a 'circlejerk' (pardon the term) framed as an in-depth article about Alice. They are a bunch of people who work for massive corporations (like those which Forbes glorifies on a daily basis), framing patents as necessary for what's called "entrepreneurs". ⬆ ______ ^* Joff Wild, writing at the (indirectly) EPO-funded IAM ‘magazine’, now sucks up to a famous proponent of software patents and an abusive patent aggressor (likely antitrust violator) called Qualcomm, which IAM dubbed "one of our IP personalities of the year.” We already showed how IAM organised an event for trolls (having been paid by some of the world's nastiest trolls) and IAM ‘magazine’ now gives an award to a patent troll and defends these indefensible actions. According to this new report, patent trolls are a growing problem even in 2015. "According to a report by Unified Patents," said the unnamed author, "an organisation that claims to fight ‘patent trolls’, published yesterday, January 4, NPEs were responsible for 66% of all infringement claims filed in US courts, an increase on last year’s figure of 61%. High-tech patents accounted for the majority of cases (64%) asserted in US courts. Following an overall drop in the number of claims filed in 2014 compared to 2013, the year 2015 saw infringement claims asserted at US courts rise by 14% compared with last year. In 2015, 5,769 cases were filed compared to 5,045 in 2014. More than 3,000 of the claims filed in 2015 were from NPEs."