"Fake news" or just opportunistic spam?

Summary: Revisiting the problem which is the "public relations" industry or patent law firms dominating news feeds about patents and warping people's understanding of all the underlying concepts

THE EPO scandals have been mostly ignored by the media and there are reasons for that. In the US, like in Europe, patent news sources got dominated by few publishers that merely repost shameless self-promotion of patent law firms. This is a problem. It's an agenda-setting, perception-warping exercise. They merely promote patents and conflate these with "innovation", "assets" etc. That's marketing pitch and it's not being fact-checked.

"Patent Analytics Software Aistemos Secures €£3M in Series A Funding," said this headline a few days ago. We've been seeing headlines of this kind for quite some time and many so-called 'news' sites about patents have placements for companies, so-called 'news' about hirings (it's actually marketing), and sponsored 'articles' with phone numbers and E-mail addresses in them (to attract business).

"Is everything just "public relations" now?"This isn't journalism. Not even remotely. But IDTechEx went even further and created a whole site that's posing as a news site. Printed Electronics World posts pure spam from Bryony Core. There was a press release with an almost identical headline on the very same day. This isn't "article" or "journalism", it's more like entryism for salesmanship (entering news feeds to front for a company). It says at the top "Hosted by IDTechEx" (to sell products for IDTechEx). It looks/seems to be a corporate site disguised as a news site -- the very type of thing we object to because it puts patent 'businesses' at the driving seat of "the news".

This is a real problem; it is not a new problem, but people should certainly be talking about it. Where does one go for objective news about patents? Are the economics associated with reporting to blame? Is everything just "public relations" now? It only gets worse over time. I've been following patent news for a decade and a half and nowadays only about 20% of news is actual journalism. The rest is composed directly or indirectly by law firms and companies that promote their patents. ⬆