Bonum Certa Men Certa

It Feels Like EPO Management is Trying to Distract the Media and the Staff From Today's Big Protest

First Hague/Dutch protest in about a year and a half! (when Battistelli inaugurated an unfinished building)

Rick and Carl: Your authority lacks credibility. I don't care. I'm immune. You don't think the stakeholders are taking notice? Production is at record levels. Look. I could set up a patent office at home to generate millions of bogus patent grants. That would be just another WIPO.



Summary: It certainly feels like something we've seen before (and journalists told us about); the EPO strategically releases puff pieces about events that are about a week apart, possibly as means of distracting the media from what is about to happen (protest later today at The Hague)

THE European Patent Office's (EPO) President António Campinos has been an utter failure. It may not seem so to the 'outside world' because the media is not at all reporting his failures, his lies, and the growing unrest among EPO staff. It also doesn't report the constant violations of the law, which yield software patents under the guise of "hey hi" -- an issue now celebrated by Watchtroll in an article entitled: "What to Know About the 2019 European Patent Office Guidelines for Examination".



For one thing, they're illegal. They compel examiners to break the law. We wrote many articles about this and last Friday examiners saw themselves facing a new dilemma: follow illegal orders or lose one's job. "The European Patent Office (EPO) recently published its Guidelines for Examination 2019, which came into force on November 1," Watchtroll wrote yesterday. They're pleased to see the new loopholes for software patents or monopolies on maths and stats. Truly appalling! This is the kind of thing we've campaigned against for nearly 13 years (today we turn 13).

"They're pleased to see the new loopholes for software patents or monopolies on maths and stats."Anyway, there's a protest today. We don't know how many people will attend, but there's a good reason for all staff on Dutch territories to attend. Things at the EPO will get yet worse before anything gets better; the writings are on the wall (or phony 'studies') as staff is further marginalised based on lies (or "false assumptions" as the union politely puts it).

We've noticed something irksome today and yesterday. Sometimes the EPO issues no "news" for weeks; but when this thing happens -- like a protest coming -- it can issue 3 in one day! We saw something similar when was G 2/19 (Enlarged Board of Appeal) was decided, as we noted several times that week. The last thing the EPO wanted back then was media coverage about how the EPO had violated its own law for a number of years*.

So what's the 'decoy' or the media 'bait'? Well, it's a bunch of things that did not even happen at the same time. It's almost as though those 'puff pieces' ('fluff') were amassed in 'the queue' for a while and then suddenly unleashed yesterday -- the day some EPO staff may decide whether to march to the Portuguese embassy to demand action against Campinos.

"So what's the 'decoy' or the media 'bait'? Well, it's a bunch of things that did not even happen at the same times."We don't wish to amplify this 'fluff' but merely to explain or rebut what we're seeing. The first puff piece concerns Mexico (warning: epo.org link). There's nothing wrong with Mexico (many headlines this week because of mass murder), but it's not a strategic country to the EPO. But management of the EPO, knowing that staff is protesting today (and may soon go on strike as well), is desperate to make some puff pieces to distract from reality. This one says: "The EPO has signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) on Reinforced Partnership with the Mexican Institute of Industrial Property (IMPI), further strengthening the longstanding co-operation between Europe and Mexico in the area of patents. The MoU was signed on Monday in Mexico City by EPO President António Campinos and IMPI Director General Juan Lozano."

On Monday. That's several days before the EPO wrote about it. Why the wait?

On the same day (warning: epo.org link) the EPO wrote that "[t]he EPO has signed a validation agreement with the government of Georgia..."

Never mind if these countries have European Patents; some more photo ops from EPO shared nonetheless, bombarding the site with puff pieces ahead of today's EPO protest. Based on the timestamps in the URL, those pieces were likely prepared a day in advance. This third puff piece, also stamped with the same date (warning: epo.org link), is a familiar stunt from the Battistelli days. The EPO's management does photo ops with country that has no European Patents at all (and it's not just there that this is done). This is laughable, pathetic even. "A delegation from Cambodia led by Senior Minister of Industry and Handicraft Cham Prasidh visited the EPO on 31 October to meet with a team from the EPO headed by President António Campinos," it says. And it took them one week to write about it? How curious!

No wonder SUEPO announces actions just a day or two in advance, depriving the EPO's management the 'intelligence' it may leverage for 'damage control' purposes. We don't think it's unreasonable to assume or theorise or hypothesise that timing of these puff pieces was very much deliberate and had a purpose. We're quite certain that the EPO's PR staff is already bombarding so-called 'journalists' in so-called 'IP' 'news' sites, trying to convince them to write about this 'fluff' instead of the important action at The Hague (this coming afternoon)**. More on that soon. ____ * Also in the news yesterday, Iain Robertson (Haseltine Lake Kempner LLP) was, quite frankly as usual, neglecting to say that the Board of Appeal totally lacks independence and is being pressured by the Office (granting authority) to embrace patent maximalism and violate the law, or the EPC. Mondaq and other patent maximalists' platforms never even mention the EPO scandals anymore. They hope that the public won't pay attention to corruption at the EPO. Robertson wrote the following (like IP Kat last week):

Two recent decisions from the Boards of Appeal of the European Patent Office have highlighted the difficulties applicants and opponents can face when trying to reply on new experimental data to support their arguments.

[...]

In T 1422/12, the Board of Appeal decided that the technical problem could be formulated to include the further technical effect of increased stability, despite this not being disclosed in the application in relation to the invention, because the background section of the patent application underlying T 1422/12 related to improving the performance characteristics of pharmaceutical products, and thus the new technical problem did fall "within the framework of the invention as disclosed in the application in suit".

The Board of Appeal decided that T 1422/12 and T 440/91 did not apply in this case, because the application did not indicate any improvement to a therapy, let alone improved bioavailability of CNP-53 in comparison to CNP-22, and so this further effect, shown by the post-published evidence, did change the character of the invention. Therefore this further effect cannot be taken into consideration when considering inventive step. Consequently, the Board of Appeal found the application lacked an inventive step, and the appeal was dismissed.


** I once met for coffee someone who had been constantly subjected to this and explained to me how the EPO's PR people handle 'the media' when they issue these puff pieces. I also know the names of the people who do this and how they do this. It's corrosive and offensive to honest journalists. They're pressured to become 'parrots' of obvious -- even to them -- lies. That's the business model!

Recent Techrights' Posts

Computers Got Smaller, So GNU/Linux Got Bigger
Many people here recognise the lack of urgency (or need) to get expensive new laptops
GNU/Linux Grows at Windows' Expense and Microsoft Trolls Infest and Maliciously Target Articles About It
Microsoft is - and has long been - organised crime
They Say I'm Mr. Bombastic
They didn't take good lawyers
 
Links 09/06/2025: Science, Hardware Projects, and Democracy Receding
Links for the day
BetaNews is a Plagiarism and LLM Slop Hub, the Chief Editor Isn't Addressing This Problem Anymore
SS Fagioli is basically a parasite leeching off or exploiting other people's work
Links 09/06/2025: Chaos in Los Angeles and Hurricane Season
Links for the day
Links 09/06/2025: Windows TCO and Many Data Breaches
Links for the day
Abuse Inside the Polish Patent Office (UPRP) - Part VI: Political Stunts by Former President Edyta Demby-Siwek and the Connection to Profound Corruption at EUIPO
it's like a money-laundering operation where one politician rewards another at taxpayers' expense
Gemini Links 09/06/2025: Pipelines and Splitgate
Links for the day
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Sunday, June 08, 2025
IRC logs for Sunday, June 08, 2025
Links 08/06/2025: Tiananmen Carnage Censorship Persists, North Korean Goes Offline
Links for the day
Gemini Links 08/06/2025: Love as an Ethnographic Method and Monitorix Gemini-Frontend v0.1
Links for the day
Links 08/06/2025: Exposure of More GAFAM Surveillance and Social Security Records Compromised
Links for the day
Linux Foundation is a Mediator for Microsoft et al, Not for Small Companies That Support Rather Than Attack the GPL
Many people still wrongly assume that because it is called "Linux Foundation", then it is pro-Linux and represents the same mindset
This Past Friday, Confirming What We Said All Along About Brett Wilson LLP: It's Shrinking, Has Considerable Debt, Loss of Net Assets Despite the Microsoft SLAPP Money
The documents only became publicly available less than 2 days ago
Some of the Many Reasons We Sued Microsofters for Harassment
perpetrators of harassment
For 20 Years Many People Were Sharecropping for Canonical's Oligarch, Now He's Deleting All Their Contributions
"Ubuntu has erased instead of archiving the trove of material at Ubuntu Forums"
There Was Always Too Much 'Crazy Stuff' Going on Around Freenode
What many IRC users lost sight of
Exposing Crime is Not a Crime (It Never Was)
In the eyes of rich and powerful people, those who speak about their crimes are the "criminals"
GNU/Linux Distros Abandoning Microsoft GitHub
Will curl be next to leave Microsoft GitHub?
Expect More XBox Mass Layoffs Soon If the Rumours Are True
From a Microsoft media operative
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Saturday, June 07, 2025
IRC logs for Saturday, June 07, 2025
Europe Needs to Move Away From GAFAM; The Sooner, the Better
Europe - not just the EU - must abandon GAFAM as soon as possible
The Issue Isn't GNOME's Promotion of Diversity But GNOME Corruption, Abuse, Censorship, and Worse
So-called "Conservative" (republican, pro-Trump, bigoted) people want you to think the problem with GNOME is politics
When the News Sources Become Scarce and Increasingly Full of Polluted/Contaminated 'Content' (With LLM Slop and Slop Images)
Integrity matters
"Linux" Sites That Spew Out LLM Slop
We're lacking enough material for another "Slopwatch"
Abuse Inside the Polish Patent Office (UPRP) - Part V: Breaking the Law, Just Like EPO
We'll hopefully cover some of the pertinent details later this year
Links 08/06/2025: Security Lapses, CISA Cuts, and More
Links for the day
Gemini Links 07/06/2025: Mime Types and Geminisphere Introduction
Links for the day
Links 07/06/2025: Slop Companies Retain All Private Data, More Books Banned in the US
Links for the day
Gemini Links 07/06/2025: "A Monk's Guide to Happiness" and "Wireless Earbuds"
Links for the day
Links 07/06/2025: More Rumours of Mass Layoffs in Microsoft's XBox Division, New COVID Variant
Links for the day
Drug Addiction is a Real Problem, It Destroys Families
a rather sensitive matter
Abuse Inside the Polish Patent Office (UPRP) - Part IV: Political Scrutiny and Errors/Inconsistencies in Official Documents
When such organisations receive scrutiny they start focusing on cover-up and muzzling of facts (or crushing people who say the truth)
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Friday, June 06, 2025
IRC logs for Friday, June 06, 2025