ONCE upon a time the EPO managed to attract some of the brightest people out there, but that is no longer the case under the new regime and the whitewash du jour says quite a lot.

"The EPO's managers are not friends of "research"; they are anti-scientific..."“The EPO recognises the importance of high-quality research,” says Benoît Battistelli according to this morning's puff piece in the EPO's 'news' section. (warning: epo.org link)

The EPO's managers are not friends of "research"; they are anti-scientific (see the latest lies about the 'results', which we debunked in about half a dozen articles^*). All they care about is their bank account.

It is "difficult for the EPO to hire workers, because more and more people realise that the EPO is a bad career move," explains this comment which we got earlier in the morning. Here is the full comment:

It gets more and more difficult for the EPO to hire workers, because more and more people realise that the EPO is a bad career move. The biggest problem is that, in case one wants to leave, there is nowhere else to go. Once an engineer has worked in patents for a few years, it is very difficult to be hired to do a normal engineering job any more, so it will be patents for the rest of your professional life. And there aren't that many patent offices hiring, so the only choice would be to be patent attorney, but it's already a bit full. Strangely enough, the UPC is not hiring examiners. I don't know who is supposed to do the litigation work (if the UPS happens, which is unlikely of course). Maybe the plan is to simply accept the search an examination of other major offices? That would indeed cut the number of examiners and attorneys needed worldwide by a factor of 4-5. As to bad career move: there was also the regulation that examiners cannot work in a 2 years grace period after they left (or have been fired). This was not accepted by the council, but it seems that Battistelli cannot accept no for an answer. I have been told by 3 different people now that it was extremely difficult to get a certificate that they worked for the EPO after they left. Without the certificate, no EQE and job interviews are a bit awkward.

• Incredibly Unscientific: EPO is Making up Excuses for Decline in Patent Applications
• Unscientific and Offensive: EPO Deletes From the Map Countries Where Number of Applications at the EPO Has Declined!
• Whenever Battistelli's EPO Says Something These Days, Safest to Just Assume It's a Lie (Because It Typically Is)
• Hidden Away in a Barely-Viewed Video is the Map of Europe Which the EPO Hides, as It Demonstrates Decline in Applications That EPO Cannot Deny
• EPO Reduces the World to Just Seven Nations to Bolster an Illusion of Growing 'Demand' for European Patents