Summary: An outline of some of the very latest deception surrounding the EPO and Team Battistelli's failed UPC coup

"Kluwer blog problems," a reader reported to us, were encountered this morning. We were able to reproduce (screenshots above). "I don't know if you have noticed," this reader said, but "Kluwer blog seems to be in trouble. It has been set back to February 2017 at the moment (when entering via http://kluwerpatentblog.com/), http://patentblog.kluweriplaw.com does not work at all and leads to an error message ("Error establishing a database connection")."

"Looks like they got cracked/disk corrupted/DB corrupted. Wonder how recent a backup they have," I responded. If accessed at the moment it says "Down for maintenance."

As longtime readers of ours know, we have been very critical of Kluwer because of its constant UPC propaganda (culminating last year with truly misleading headlines). As Juve put it this week (Christina Schulze's article), UPC is in serious trouble this year. Here is a purely automated translation of the introduction (perhaps SUEPO will publish a translation of the whole some time soon):

UPC complaint: Karlsruhe expands soundings, proceedings are delayed

A decision on the constitutional complaint against the Unified Patent Court (UPC) is delayed again. The reason is that in October the Federal Constitutional Court asked three other organizations to comment. This extends the deadline for the 22 previously requested by the Karlsruhe judges for comments organizations from late October to late in the year.

We repeatedly wrote about Bristows uttering their lies in Kluwer Patent Blog (now mostly published anonymously) and deleting comments they don't like about the UPC. They got caught. Yesterday Team UPC (Bristows) continued to conveniently ignore the simple fact that UPC is NOT compatible with Brexit and issued yet another one of those blog posts, with talking points they have been attempting to interject into British media. A member of staff of theirs has additionally just published this SEP promotion courtesy of Christopher Weber (Kather Augenstein), another UPC booster. Who are they kidding? We wrote about the subject of SEP many times before, well before we talked about EPO scandals. It's not exactly surprising that the same people who lobby for the UPC also promote patent aggression and trolls. If we are harsh on these people, it's because they deserve it. They represent a threat to Europe.

The Unitary Patent has essentially died (even some patent 'industry' insiders openly state so), but the EPO, as usual, feels free to lie about it if/as long as it helps Team Battistelli (Mr. Battistelli and his cronies).

Yesterday it wrote: "The Register for the #unitarypatent protection will have the same structure & functionality of the European Patent Register."

The word "will" insinuates inevitability. There's no such thing.

It is worth noting that it certainly looks like the Battistelli-friendly PR 'squad' is now trawling comments in The Register, trying to tell the author incorrect things about Battistelli, who is sinking into serious scandals that can entail accountability.

As for IP Kat? It's as dead as can be as far as EPO criticism is concerned. People no longer know if their comments will be accepted, so fewer people bother (and perhaps some don't get their comments published at all). Names of people can no longer be mentioned, but the following new comment got through. It said: "The current top 3 most visited articles all concern the EPO" (the very topic that IP Kat suppresses discussions about)

Here is the full comment:

Perhaps it is also worth considering who this blog is actually directed at rather than who reads it? The current top 3 most visited articles all concern the EPO and will attract many readers among EPO staff - particularly given the oppressive regime there which acts against free discussion. The Ipkat is a public and anonymous forum, in fact a proxy meeting place for some. But of course the Ipkat is more than just an EPO discussion board. So, for that reason I’m sure a little balance is required, particularly in terms of monitoring content.

Good luck Merpel. You can please some of the people....

It certainly seems like using bribes, threats and maybe even AstroTurfing the EPO now engages in information warfare; that extends to UPC, too. ⬆