On 1 March 2010 he was elected president of the European Patent Office, after a long and controversial series of meetings of the Administrative Council. He took up the post on 1 July 2010, for a term of five years. He was the sixth president of the EPO, the second Frenchman to hold the post, and the first president who has previously held the post of Chairman of the Administrative Council. Under Battistelli's tenure, the EPO played an important role in the preparatory work for the introduction of the unitary patent, which has yet to come into existence. In this context, Battistelli was listed in 2014 by the Managing Intellectual Property magazine as one of the 50 most influential people in intellectual property. In June 2014, Battistelli's term of office as EPO president was extended for a further three years until 30 June 2018, amidst concerns from the EPO staff. In July 2018, he was succeeded by António Campinos.
Discontent within the EPO staff
Battistelli's presidency has encountered discontent among the staff and has been marked by industrial actions with an escalation of the conflict in 2014. Discontent on the part of staff has been attributed to Battistelli's style of management which, according to reports in the German newspapers Die Zeit and Die Welt, was perceived by staff as being unduly autocratic and unsuited to a European intergovernmental body such as the EPO, and, according to an article in the French newspaper Le Monde, has been brought in relation with suicides among the EPO staff since 2013. Battistelli's management style has also been criticized in the Dutch newspaper De Telegraaf, and by Philip Cordery, member of the French National Assembly. In an interview to the German business lawyer journal JUVE, Siegfried Bross, former judge at the Federal Constitutional Court of Germany, expressed the view that EPO's organization giving its president excessive powers is "principally incompatible with the European Convention on Human Rights " and that EPO's president, Benoît Battistelli, acted in 2015 against an EPO staff member "without legal legitimacy". On 9 March 2018 a petition signed by 924 patent examiners denounced "the submission to constraints that are no longer compatible with fulfilling appropriately our duties within the Search and Examination divisions". They wrote: “We are far too often put in front of the dilemma of either working according to the European Patent Convention and respecting the examiner’s guidelines, or issuing ‘products’ as our hierarchy demands".
Computer tapping controversy
In June 2015, shortly before a meeting of the EPO President with the European Parliament, news broke of a controversial computer tapping action which apparently took place at the EPO towards the end of 2014. An article published in the German newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung stated that it had obtained an internal report which showed that the EPO had tapped two publicly accessible computers that had been identified as a source for leaked information. The systems were placed under surveillance using cameras and keylogging and this led to the suspension of a member of staff. These events led the Bavarian Data Protection Commissioner, Thomas Petri, and the Federal German Data Protection Commissioner, Andrea Vosshoff, to raise concerns regarding data protection matters at the EPO.
