Peek Into European Patent Examining Cancelled

We were going to run European Patent Examiner John Savage's answers to 10 Slashdot questions today, but he emailed us this morning and asked us to pull them back because he was was in trouble over the interview. What he had to say was informative, non-controversial, and would not have hurt his employer's reputation at all, but we don't want John to lose his job or face disciplinary action on our account. Anyway, get ready for a slightly unusual Slashdot interview guest next week: Celeb chef and self-described "culinary cartographer" Alton Brown.

Comments

I expected this, it's a standard employment clause

[tiltowait]

"Don't talk to the press without permission" or "divert all media inquiries to the communications office" are boilerplate phrases from most every employee manual.

It's a control issue, for fear that every statement released will appear to be official company policy (cf. those "my opinions alone" email sigs, or /. headlines "Microsoft says..." that should be "A single Microsoft peon says...", or the recent Saudi pentagon leak, etc. etc.).

If you think this level of control isn't necessary for communications reps to do their job, why don't you give everyone root access and see what happens. :)