Calm before the storm?

Summary: On the surface, things may seem calm at the EPO, but under this façade lie very serious issues, whose affected parties are banned from speaking about

LATER TODAY we will release some EPO material which we hope will remind people why the EPO is dangerous. Everyone at the EPO's management tries to play up the UPC while EPO scandals continue to surface and according to this survey from WIPR:

Developments in Europe concerning trademark reform and the Unified Patent Court (UPC) were noted by respondents as the most important changes.

At the close of the year, the European Patent Office announced that the unitary patent was “legally” and “technically” ready for lift off. However, UPC member states are still waiting for the ratification by the UK and Germany (as well as a number of other countries).

In May, the UPC took a major leap forward after Spain’s challenge to the legality of the agreement was struck down by the Court of Justice of the European Union.

"SUEPO resumed their posting on http://www.suepo.org page," one person told us (SUEPO's public page updated for the first time in four weeks). There is also this new (corrected) press release about controversial patents on cancer treatments at the EPO. Other than that, the EPO has been reasonably quiet. It has been almost invisible, maybe by intention. The EPO Forums (based on proprietary software by the looks of it) that have been there for several years and attracted only a few hundreds of threads are quite miserably being promoted in Twitter this week. It's likely or at least possible that even the forums in SUEPO attracted more activity than the EPO Forums. Heck, even IP Kat comments about the EPO are more frequent than postings in the EPO Forums. How pathetic is that?

As a comment from IP Kat put it the other day:

2016!.. another year of “Esprit de service” among the BB [Benoît Battistelli] goon squad, a group that is amiable in the extreme, looking for full concurrence on every topic, with a complete absence of upsetting bickering that could ruin their cosiness. A comfortable consensus built around an illusion: that everyone in the squad had a perverse addiction to power. Yet no one questioned it. The main victim of the EPO’s “Esprit de service” is critical thought, which leaves behind a muddy trail of irrational…actions.

Later today we are going to release something new. There is no reason to withdraw EPO flak as all the EPO abuses persist and no reparations or revocations have been reported as yet.

It sometimes seem like keeping a low profile became the PR strategy of the EPO in 2016. That was the NSA's strategy before Snowden leaked a lot of documents to the press. ⬆