THE EPO is in a state of crisis (as even the entire Organisation admits). The President has 0% approval rating and there is growing unrest. Later this year EPO management will probably be chastised by the Dutch Supreme Court (and Dutch politicians, never mind Dutch media) and another trial at The Hague began on Friday. There are clearly several cases against EPO management at The Hague right now. The latter is about the attack on staff representatives (more of them silently got sacked recently) and the former about a variety of issues less severe (but nonetheless ones for which the EPO was found guilty).
EPO workers, we recently learned, are already doing fund-raisers for a post-Battistelli party. This party would probably take a while to actually take place and additionally, his departure isn't the end of it all. He has polluted the entire management rank. It's full of his cronies now. If Battistelli's craziness and his paranoia continue to escalate, soon enough he'll hire people with jobs skills like "eating" to test (or taste) his food for him. He has become just about as insane as Erdoßan or other tyrants which history turned into iconic symbols (not just Napoleon). "Still no comment from the EPO President about the coup attempt in Turkey," one person wrote earlier today. "Doesn't he care about what is going on there? Let us not forget that Turkey is an EPO member state!!!"
The EPO has said nothing about Turkey but instead it has just released a pile of lies (they call it "social report" rather than "social study", maybe to help dodge -- SEO-wise -- the negative association with the long-malign 'study'). We wrote about this study many times before, e.g. in [1, 2, 3]. Insiders have warned about how it was done and why it would tell lies once released. Right now the EPO's PR team and its outside help (FTI Consulting, with over a million Euros of EPO budget) must be pressuring journalists to repeat their 'social' lies. How many will they manage to bamboozle and/or co-opt? That remains to be seen.
It typically takes a day or two for the EPO to mention its blog posts or "news" [sic] in its Twitter account. Over at Twitter today the EPO is promoting this event in Madrid, Spain. In spite of or because Spain is a thorn in the EPO's side? Remember that Spain is one of the biggest barriers to the UPC and mind the fact that "EPO management is still busy with the UPC," according to this new comment. Here is the comment in full: "People discuss the future of the board of appeal as it it had a future. The president said it many times: in his mind, there is no need for the board of appeal with the UPC. The board of appeal members missing have not been replaced in the past years (just check how many posts are still vacant) and will not be replaced. The move to another place is classical in French politics, just check how it was done at French Telecom (it's in the press): they moved people around to harass them and force them to resign. The EPO management is still busy with the UPC, BTW. They believe brexit is not a problem."
"This so-called 'social' report (propaganda to mislead about the management's antisocial behaviour) is just the latest distraction."The EPO can ignore Brexit all it wants, but it pretty much rendered the UPC dead (or dying, or in a limbo for several years to come). Looking beyond the failed UPC, Sweden opens a new specialised court of its own. "A new era for the Swedish intellectual property market will be ushered in on September 1 2016 with the opening of the Patent and Market court in Stockholm," wrote a sister site of WIPR. "On the whole, Swedish participants in this year’s WTR 1000 research process are expecting the introduction of a specialised, IP-exclusive court to be an overwhelmingly positive development for their jurisdiction."
Things are not working out so well for the EPO these days. This so-called 'social' report (propaganda to mislead about the management's antisocial behaviour) is just the latest distraction. ⬆