EPO: We and Microsoft Will Spy on Everything (No Physical Copies)

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2024-04-28 12:00:04

THE Central Staff Committee of the EPO has written to António Campinos (along with Steve Rowan, who outsourced the EPO to Microsoft) and shared some information with colleagues. The letter is dated last Thursday and it is summarised as follows:

The discontinuation of on-demand paper files was announced on 26 March 2024 during the Easter Holidays and implemented a few days later on 1 April 2024. No statutory consultation in the COHSEC and the GCC took place beforehand. The decision took staff by surprise without any transitional period and hence was negatively perceived, especially among the non-negligible number of colleagues still working on paper.

While some examiners have fully adapted to a complete paperless work, there is a substantial number of examiners who, for various reasons, continue to work with paper dossiers. As acknowledged in the IPI note, examiners will still be able to print the documents individually at the local printers. However, this measure is not enough from an organisational point of view at examiner level. These paper dossiers need to be stored and more importantly, to be retrievable by the examiner in charge at any moment in order to perform a proper examination work.

In this open letter, we propose that the service of providing examiners with file wrappers labelled with stickers be maintained so that locally printed dossiers can be easily stored in an organised manner.