Guest post: Bloggers or Blaggers? Stalkers or Leakers? Have OHIM stolen Europe's Auto Secrets?

Thanks to Dave Musker for permission to reproduce this from the Class 99 blog:

There is nothing the auto industry enjoys so much as the razzamatazz of a new car launch.  Yet as mass expulsions remind us of the spy era, there are rumours that OHIM has a mole, who leaks new car designs to auto bloggers.  "It's no great secret that the European Union's patent office has more leaks than a Soviet submarine" writes Noah Joseph of Autoblog, according to whom OHIM "has more leaks than a colendar".  Alex Ricciuti of  Worldcarfans  claims to be publishing pictures "... courtesy of a leak from the European Office for Harmonization of the Internal Market (OHIM), where trademark records are kept."
Rather than take these alarming claims at face value, in this blog-eat-blog world a few quick searches enable us to reveal the truth.
Take first Ricciuti's claim to have published leaked designs of the Opel Ampera.   His blog article is dated 18th February 2009.  However, the pictures he shows had already, quite properly, been published by OHIM several days earlier on 11th February as RCD 001086300-0001.
On to Autoblog (motto: "We Obsessively Cover the Car Industry").  They revealed the design of the Suzuki Kizashi on 11th September 2008, acknowledging their source as OHIM's records, and not at that time claiming that there had been a leak.  OHIM had published the design in question the previous day, as RCD 000990122-0001.  On 18th January 2009, they broke news of the design of the Nissan 370Z Roadster, Joseph this time claiming that it was from an OHIM leak.  In fact, lower down the article they quote their source as The Motor Report blog, on which the relevant article (also of 18th January) cites OHIM but does not claim a leak.  And, indeed, OHIM had published the design as RCD 001030282-0002 on 14th January.
Joseph's "Soviet submarine" claim was made in the course of his disclosure of the design of the "stretch" Pullman Mercedes reported on 4th May 2009.  But, as you are by now no doubt expecting, OHIM had published the design as RCD 000999024 (several parts) on 30th April.
In the same article, Joseph referred back to the Nissan Roadster "leak", and one other, dated 11th August 2008, concerning the "facelifted" Mazda 3.  The Mazda 3 article quotes as its source an article on the Carspyshots blog.  Here perhaps the timing is less clear.  OHIM appears to have published the design in question as RCD 000977384-0001 on 11th August.  So, how is it that the pseudonymous Carspyshots posting is apparently dated 9th August 2008, 23:45, and last edited on 10th August at 17:51?  But even here, pPerhaps timezone differences enabled the editor to see OHIM's publication and then disclose the design the "previous" day.
Putting these claims together, there is no evidence that anyone has published OHIM applications before OHIM itself has done so.  On the other hand, there is ample evidence that the blogs are closely monitoring publications in the car class (Locarno class 12.08) and publishing within a few days, or even hours - one could be forgiven for assuming that they were tipped off in advance, but the evidence does not require that assumption.  Unless Joseph or Ricciuti care to reveal their sources, it seems likely that they are simply passing off stalking as leaking.
To take one last example, on 13th July, the Carscoop blog published an article disclosing some Chevrolet designs.  OHIM had published these on 12th July, as RCD 001729088-0001 & 2.  The filing date was ... only five days earlier, on 7th July.  
The moral?  OHIM is now publishing e-filed applications in a matter of days.  Carmakers who want to keep their designs under wraps would do well to use OHIM's "deferred publication" system, to keep the publication date in their own hands.