Bonum Certa Men Certa

PR 'Innovation': Bombarding the Media With Puff Pieces to Distract From EPO Staff Actions Against Corrupt Management

Distracted cats won't cover the real story

A distraction



Summary: The media is not touching -- not even remotely -- stories regarding unrest at the EPO (even if SUEPO puts such stories out there for the public to see); instead it's all just Public Relations (PR) of the EPO's dictatorship

THE European Patent Office (EPO) appears to have issued 'damage-controlling' puff pieces as EPO staff marches to the Portuguese embassy to protest the policies of António Campinos -- at times even worse policies than Battistelli's. He's faking a crisis to destroy staff whilst outsourcing jobs. He's also blocking legal challenges to Battistelli's illegal policies.



"The EPO is a shrine of Campinos now, as is the Twitter account."Let's look at what the EPO is doing today and has done so far this week (as the protest in The Hague became imminent). On Tuesday the EPO was promoting invalid patents (IPs) under the guise of "digital fields!" See who's talking there! See what the EPO did for the 'hero' Campinos [1, 2, 3, 4]. The EPO is a shrine of Campinos now, as is the Twitter account. Here he is talking about "AI" (computer-generated applications) [1, 2] and then about patents as "technical problem" (often codeword/s for software patents in Europe). To quote the tweet: "We assess inventions based on whether they solve a technical problem. It's not up to us to decode on prices of final products, says EPO President António Campinos at #websummit"

Yes, so-called 'Web' Summit, where software patents' boosters were presented as 'experts'. Why does the EPO even grant such patents? As of last Friday, examiners are now virtually forced to grant these if it says "AI". Here's a new example involving European Patents: "Philips and Wiko compete over mobile phone patents" by Konstanze Richter. The number of the patents are in the article and Benjamin Henrion said "Philips is a troll, enforcing patent over "method for priority-based queuing and assembling of packets in mobile communication"..."

Well, these are algorithms that should not be granted any patents (monopolies on them). From the article: "The judges in Karlsruhe recognised a violation of the slightly restricted version of the SEP by Wiko’s German subsidiary. They therefore sentenced the defendant to information and accounting. However, the court rejected the claim of the plaintiff Philips for injunctive relief (case ID: 6 U 183/16). The judges thus agreed with Wiko’s objection that the Dutch licence offer was not FRAND-compliant."

"Well, these are algorithms that should not be granted any patents (monopolies on them)."The site's editor wrote: "There’s been another setback for @Philips in Germany. In the ongoing battle over mobile phone patent, the Dutch company lost one #implementation #patent. It also failed to obtain an injunction against Wiko in infringement proceedings..."

So-called 'implementation' patent. Welcome to the world of nonsensical semantics. Did they try "hey hi" (AI)?

"And they announced this only a week later, a day or so before a big protest -- the first such protest in a year and a half?"Going back to the EPO, here it is publishing another "news" item (warning: epo.org link); they've published at least 5 press releases in just 2 days -- more than they typically do in a whole month! Based on our research, this 'fluff' has resulted in news 'saturation' with more noise (PR) than signal. The Azerbaijan-based "Trend News Agency" prepared puff pieces like this one regarding Georgia and there's another one from Khmer Times in Cambodia. That's just copy-paste 'journalism' from the EPO's own mouth and with the EPO's photo ops! "Cambodia and the European Patent Office last week bolstered ties with the signing of a new cooperation agreement to increase awareness of patents and intellectual property in the Kingdom."

And they announced this only a week later, a day or so before a big protest -- the first such protest in a year and a half?

This is what the EPO has just published:

An EPO delegation including António Campinos, EPO President, Nellie Simon, Vice-President Corporate Services, and several expert examiners took part in Web Summit in Lisbon between 4 and 6 November. The summit is the world’s largest technology event, drawing 70 000 visitors from 160 countries. This year is the first in which the Office was invited to lead a panel discussion and host an exhibition area.

President Campinos was joined by Dr Keigham J. Gabriel, President and CEO at Draper Lab, and Carmela Troncoso, Head of Security & Privacy Engineering at École polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), for a panel discussion on the topic “Patenting the future: The next big invention”. The panel noted that intellectual property and in particular patents have played a major role in innovation, and that without this protection, scientific advancement is stifled.


There are quite a bunch of lies in there; Henrion might assess the whole video from the event for further scrutiny of the claims/assertions.

The EPO is meanwhile also retweeting this self-promotional stuff about its event with patent trolls' front groups. Joe Doyle from EI is their megaphone of choice, revealing that the EPO has a 'taste' for litigation, not innovation. But we all knew that already, right? The EPO then published its fifth puff piece in two days (warning: epo.org link) to say: "On 4 and 5 November 2019 the European Patent Office (EPO) and the Licensing Executives Society International (LESI) held their first-ever joint conference focussed on the importance of IP to high-growth firms. The top-level hybrid conference and training event was attended by around 300 participants from 34 nations and organised in Dublin by the EPO’s European Patent Academy with the support of the government agency Enterprise Ireland. The event provided a platform for decision makers and IP managers at high-growth tech companies (namely start-ups and more classical SMEs) as well as their stakeholders in the innovation ecosystem to learn about business strategy and IP management."

"...there's plenty printed based on the EPO's own words with its own promotional material such as photos."Obviously, as expected, nobody in the media (not even blogs!) covered the EPO protest from a fortnight ago (in Munich). Nobody even mentions what happens today in The Hague. But there's plenty printed based on the EPO's own words with its own promotional material such as photos.

Recent Techrights' Posts

Starting a Book With a Flawed Premise or Weak Hypothesis
To me, Schneier is a sort of "RMS of sec"
Microsoft's Mass Layoffs (30,000+ in 2025) Not About "AI", Just Business Failure
"AI" is replacing... the old excuses for mass layoffs
EPO People Power - Part XVI - Berenguer Does Not Speak German, So What Did He Tell German Police That Busted Him?
based in Germany and does not speak the language
Challenges for EPO Insiders to Try to Tackle in 2026
Nothing will get solved as long as the circus that runs this show tries to keep the circus going
 
New Record for GNU/Linux in Australia (at Microsoft's Expense)
Windows is at an all-time low, GNU/Linux... all-time high
Fighting Over Whose Pockets Are Deeper (or Who Borrows More Money)
When processes favour those who are more wealthy (or more willing to go into infinite debt or steal money of other people) those processes match the attributes of lawfare rather than law
You Know Your Critics Are Jealous and Have Inferiority Complex When...
One day we'll write about all this in great depth
"But Corruption is Everywhere"
"We'll always have Polio..."
Days Without Slop About "Linux"
It's time to move on
Links 27/12/2025: Canada Post Strike Called Off, Debate About Europeans "Working Over Christmas"
Links for the day
Gemini Links 27/12/2025: Household Appliances and Flight Fright
Links for the day
Links 27/12/2025: US Cracking Down on Whistleblowers, Expanding Bombardment Campaigns Worldwide
Links for the day
Resuming EPO Coverage Today, Can António Campinos 'Survive' Cocainegate?
We said we'd continue in the weekend
Links 27/12/2025: More Attacks on Media (Meduza Co-founder Sentenced to Prison in Absentia), "What Owning Music Means To Me"
Links for the day
Gemini Links 27/12/2025: geminiprotocol.net Downtime and Capsular Gemlog Manager
Links for the day
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Friday, December 26, 2025
IRC logs for Friday, December 26, 2025
Tossing Embarrassing News Under the Christmastime Bus
This isn't just some coincidence; those are conscious choices
Victim-Blaming in Debian
Verhelst previously did blame-shifting when Debian suicide clusters happened
IBM Cuts in Japan, Red Hat is Attached to a Sinking Ship
IBM, which controls Red Hat, is a rapidly shrinking company
Manchester United Dumped Microsoft Because Qualcomm Sort of Did
The Windows PCs were an utter failure
Free Software Foundation (FSF) Supported by Unconventional Digital Bartering Communities
But no strings attached
Geminispace: 5,000 Capsules in 2026
There are 4.8k now
Gemini Links 26/12/2025: Careful What You Eat and "My Secret Santa"
Links for the day
The Indigenous Community Versus Corporate AstroTurt and 'Cancel Culture'
Good people will recognise exactly what's happening here and respond to it tactfully
Richard Stallman: Epstein is a Serial Rapist. Bill Epsteingate: Epstein is a Friend.
Supporting the FSF (or Richard Stallman) is supporting those who asserted Epstein had serially raped women
The Paradox of GAFAM: Saying You Protect Women, Appointing Abusers of Women to Run the Company
older articles
Censored by FreeBSD Core Team Secretary, Reinstated After Talking About it in Public
FreeBSD misfiring a CoC?
Links 26/12/2025: Chatbot Toys Terrorising Children, US Undeclared "War on Terror" Unilaterally Extends to Nigeria During Holidays
Links for the day
Links 26/12/2025: French Postal Services Under Russian Attack, U.S. Cheetos Accuse People Who Obstruct Information Warfare by Russia of "Censorship"
Links for the day
Debian's Daniel Kahn Gillmor is Wrong, Signal is No "Gold Standard" (It's Also Promoted by Proponents of Back Doors)
I'm not too sure why Debian or the ACLU would wish to associate with this
Next Year Will be the Year of Quantum, Just Like 2020, 2015, 2010, 2005 and So On
"Quantum" is the future
The Silent Power of Coercion Over Speech
The important thing is optics
Kazakhstan Doesn't Need GAFAM Datacentres (Spy Hubs)
Suffice to say, as far as we can gather nothing came out from the empty (false) promises of GAFAM's "data centers in Kazakhstan"
So Simple That You Can Touch and Feel It
In light of recent experiences
Christmas Music Project: Back to When Music Was Music
now Canonical (or Ubuntu) says we should make available tens of gigabytes of disk space
Internet Relay Chat (IRC) Under Attack by Cross-Network Spam Floods
So far we've been spared (our network has not been targeted at all) [...] Let's hope the spam won't discourage the hundreds of thousands of people worldwide who still use IRC
An "AI-Infused" Windows
Microsoft Windows isn't becoming a worthless pile of garbage by accident
Microsoft Laid Off Over 30,000 People This Year, Coders Are "Too Expensive"
Go get some popcorn. Microsoft "slopware" is about to get real!
Critics Have Long Said Microsoft Produces "Slopware", Microsoft Wants to Prove Them Right
Slop instead of code is a step in the right direction?
The Top 8 Innovations of IBM in 2025
What innovations will come out from IBM in 2026?
And as the Year Turns...
The significance of new years isn't based on geology or astronomy or anything like that
Appliances Versus Computers
Replacing a computer inside an object of some kind or inside an appliance (which nowadays includes "modern" cars) isn't simple and isn't cheap
A Dark Side of Europe
They try hard to silence people who speak about these issues
Why People Love Techrights (and Also Loved "Boycott Novell")
I will continue to publish for many decades to come
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Thursday, December 25, 2025
IRC logs for Thursday, December 25, 2025
Browsing Techrights With a GUI and 10 Megabytes of RAM Per Tab
Some people say it's not possible in 2025, maybe in part because they depend on very bloated software
A Tribute to Richard Stallman
It's about knowledge and sharing
Links 26/12/2025: Impermanence, Salt and Thermometer, Freetube
Links for the day
Gemini Links 25/12/2025: Hibernation and TV Detox
Links for the day
Canonical is Making the Cost of PCs Very High, Due to Unnecessary Ubuntu Bloat
They say the reason for the price surge is LLM hype/frenzy
Canonical's Ubuntu is Bloatware
How did Ubuntu get so fat?
The EPO is a Very Vicious Organisation You Neither Wish to Join Nor Stay in for "Too Long"
Consider what the EPO thinks of its own workers, the staff that actually does real work
2026 Will Hopefully Turn Out to be Slopless
we seem to be starting the post-Christmas period on the right footing
Links 25/12/2025: Mail Carriers in "a Murky Future", Dihydroxyacetone Man’s "Chip Embargo Against China Backfiring Spectacularly"
Links for the day
The Register MS: All I Want For Xmas is Microsoft
they actually put effort into it
How to Win Nobel Prize for Peace
Do you get to Heaven (or peace platitudes) by sleeping with 72 virgins?
The Right to Repair (Especially When Products Are So Poorly Made)
Many electrical appliances fail often/quick and are nearly impossible to repair
Links 25/12/2025: Ample Cover-up Found in Jeffrey Epstein Files; ChatGPT Causes Psychosis, Not a Good Use Case
Links for the day
Giving Money to Free Software
In life, people must make sacrifices to do what's right and just
The Register MS: Don't Use Linux
That really says a lot about The Register MS
EPO People Power - Part XV - EPO Cocainegate to Resume This Weekend
The next installment (number 16) will probably come out this weekend
Microsoft: XBox is Going "Online", "Cloud"...
XBox as a console is pretty much dead
The Year of the Bubble
We hope that in 2026 the marketing liars will find some new buzzwords to latch onto and quit calling everything "AI"
Mozilla Firefox is a GAFAM Browser With Slop, Move to a Free Software Web Browser
on mobile the options would be more limited
libera.chat Was Under Attack Last Night
Several months from now libera.chat turns 5
Free Software Foundation (FSF) Raises Over $300,000 Before Christmas
the FSF made it past $300,000
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Wednesday, December 24, 2025
IRC logs for Wednesday, December 24, 2025