SUEPO (EPO's staff union) complains about censorship. Not only SUEPO is being censored (in a variety of seemingly subtle ways). The media that would otherwise pay attention to SUEPO barely exists anymore. It has been systematically defanged by the 'Mafia' in Munich.
"The media that would otherwise pay attention to SUEPO barely exists anymore."For those who don't know, IP Kat used to write about EPO corruption, but after repeated threats from the EPO the whole team of writers (people who had written about this corruption) was gradually changed and nowadays this blog not only self-censors; it actively blocks even comments that mention EPO crimes. The blog's censorship team has been getting too slippery/hasty with the finger lately. Yesterday we saw a comment that says: "Hi Andy, I am told that your response comment was accidentially deleted by the moderation team- sorry about that, please do send it again!"
Yesterday somebody told us about the need to register upfront for a stream of the hearing about software patents in Europe (we heard that António Campinos is interfering with impartiality of judges again, just like Benoît Battistelli did). This is what could become a European equivalent -- at least in the caselaw sense -- of 35 U.S.C. €§ 101/Alice in the United States. But given the poor state of journalism and the abusive relationship between the Office and BoA, we keep our hopes low.
"Does the media talk about it? Not anymore."The EPO is, and in 2020 even more so, an abusive institution. It's totally out of control.
Does the media talk about it? Not anymore.
The so-called 'study' (selective propaganda) of the EPO, another 'scholarly' veneer on a Mafia-like operation, has managed to penetrate a few sites that call themselves "news sites"; the EPO published this thing (warning: epo.org link) a couple of days ago under the "news" section:
EPO’s latest landscaping study entitled “Patents and additive manufacturing – Trends in 3D printing technologies” demonstrates that innovation in this field is surging across multiple industries.
[...]
The report shows that European countries account for 47% (or 7 863) of all AM inventions for which patent applications were filed at the EPO between 2010 and 2018.
"It doesn't seem to matter how many crimes are committed inside the EPO, the media isn't interested in covering any of them. When we ask about the reasons they sometimes even blame COVID (as if the perfect excuse for not mentioning corruption is a pandemic that came to Europe half a year ago)."If journalism isn't dead, it is certainly dying a fast death. If this isn't paid for, it's a case of gullible writers without any scepticism or critical skills becoming peripheral PR or an extension of marketing departments, which yield press releases [1, 2] with a different story in each country (and different languages, to broaden the propaganda's target audience/reach). For the US there's a bunch, including "The US Leads Boom in 3D Printing Patents at the European Patent Office" and here's the UK slant we mentioned here the other day. The Dutch slant said "The Netherlands listed in Top 5 of European hub for innovative 3D printing" (from Innovation Origins -- a site we never saw before).
The patent maximalist Susan Decker wrote about this for Bloomberg, soon to be syndicated all around the Web, e.g. [1, 2], and it's basically just a puff piece or megaphone for the EPO:
"Most of them are industrial actors that are considering this technology to change their approach to manufacturing," said EPO's Chief Economist Yann Ménière. "It has a very high versatility - it's very flexible and scalable."