2 November 2016, 10.30 am
I arrive late for my first meeting, due to having shopped for my tea on the way in. My tea is going to be six packets of Hotel Chocolat® goodies, and a plastic pot of well-disciplined, accurately chopped fruit from my favourite self-service check-out. The New Reconstructed Me is taking life a little easier these days, and rather than getting up half an hour earlier in order to make time to buy human essentials (ie chocolate), I am arriving at meetings half an hour later. The committee whose meeting I attend half of is the Congress Steering Committee. This noble group did a fine job of steering the 2016 Congress into port without me, while I was malingering at home surrounded by flowers. Therefore I do not think they really need me around to help steer the 2017 Congress. Judging by the looks I get when I enter the room, this thought is widely shared. Mr Davies looks as if he’s seen a ghost. Having been away from CIPA for a while, I have resolved that in my first few meetings I will shut up and listen and try to work out what’s been going on in my absence. But I have never been good at shutting up and listening, and nor am I accustomed to knowing what’s going on. So within a few minutes of arrival I blurt out an absolutely stunning idea for a theme for next year’s Congress. There are polite sniggers. The committee has already come up with this theme for itself, thank you. Which justifies the earlier thought about not needing me around any more. For the avoidance of doubt, the theme for the 2017 CIPA Congress is going to be to remind people that the UK exists and that it still does intellectual property. IP is in fact possibly the only facet of international trade in which a post-Brexit UK stands a fighting chance of success. This is because since the dawn of time we have been carefully building relationships with our international counterparts and explaining to them how much better the UK’s IP laws are than anybody else’s. And also because everybody in IP is a little bit stand-offish anyway, so being out of the EU is not going to look unduly unsociable in a room full of patent attorneys.
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2 November 2016, 6.30 am
With huge delight, I embark on my first London visit for several months. My heart soars as I follow the orange-pink opening of the sky up the M5. By the time I take my place on the station platform, I am virtually ecstatic. The delight, the soaring heart and the ecstasy are of course literary devices and nothing whatsoever to do with the truth, which is that by the time the train diesels its big, black bulk into the station, I am ready to diesel myself under it. I find myself a seat in a smelly carriage, there being no non-smelly carriages on this particular train, and try to catch up on sleep. I am back on the London commute. Thrice yay! 6 October 2016
Meanwhile, back at 95 Chancery Lane, CIPA has been trying to decide what to do about Brexit. Someone has to. One of the key things to decide is what will happen to the UPC. Will it be possible, for example, for the UK to be part of the UPC system despite having left the EU? Will the UK want to cede to the CJEU when it has shunned all other European laws in favour of taking back control of its own bankruptcy? Will London still be able to host one of the UPC’s Central Divisions and if so, who is going to clean it and man the canteen when we have sent all the immigrants back where they came from? We take Counsel’s advice on the legal technicalities. This is not the same as taking Council’s advice; it is much quicker but also much more expensive. After we have received Counsel’s advice, we can show it to Council, which will disagree with it and then ask a further sixteen slightly related questions. Counsel’s advice is all well and good, of course, but I suspect the legal technicalities are not going to be what sways it for the UPC. Theresa May, who is by the way a woman, is giving off vibes that suggest joining an EU institution and ceding power to the CJEU will not be the policy of choice. Theresa May, who looked radiant at yesterday’s Tory Party Conference in a little brown dress and appeared to have lost a pound or two (in both senses of the term), is not I imagine going to be interested in ratifying an EU agreement before we Brexit, solely for the purpose of giving patentees access to a judicial system that makes the UK look irrelevant. Theresa May, whose husband joined her on the podium to show that he at least doesn’t mind her doing this job, says that Brexit means Brexit and I somehow don’t think that’s the same as Brexit means Brexit-apart-from-the-UPC. Theresa May, who is going to help the working classes get on their bikes and get prosperous again, is not the type of politician, I mean woman, who is going to care much about EU-wide patents when she is doing all she can to isolate Britain from the nasty, interfering, pilfering, empire-building rest of the world. Britain having taught them to interfere, pilfer and empire-build in the first place. So all across Europe, people are starting to think about rewriting the UPC and UP agreements all over again, only without the UK in. This will enable them to cut out some of the stuffy old legalese, whilst introducing a whole load more European arm-waving fuzziness for Luxembourg to interpret later. And CIPA’s job will be to persuade people outside Europe that none of this matters; it is business as usual in the UK, honest, by which we mean that the UK never paid that much attention to the CJEU anyway, other than in blogs. But our biggest challenge is likely to be that the nasty, interfering, pilfering, empire-building rest of the world is probably no longer interested in interfering with our tiny, isolated little island, or in pilfering its devalued assets, or in including it in any empires. This is going to be a hard sell. And although Mr Lampert and many others from the IP world have produced a beautiful booklet about the wonders of the UK’s IP system – because I told them to last year – they are not sure it will be current for long. 5 October 2016
I am at home, recovering from an operation. I was discharged early from hospital, following a petition which the nurses presented to the consultant. He was happy to go with their recommendation, because he was fed up of my patent attorney questions, for instance about the pH of my intravenous drip and the level of his professional indemnity insurance. My family had tried to put together a counter-petition of their own, but they were not quick enough to avert the disaster. So now I am taking it easy and avoiding too much CIPA work. It is bad luck to do CIPA work while you’re convalescing, just like it is bad luck to go anywhere near a supermarket or a vacuum cleaner or a casserole pot within three months of surgery. You can’t afford to take chances. For someone as naturally hyperactive as me, it is frustrating not being part of things. So every now and then, I log on and check my CIPA emails, and some of them I am quite pleased not to be part of, and others I really, really want to voice my opinion about so I have to go pour a gin and tonic to distract myself. Mr Davies and the other officers are doing just fine without me, and indeed are glad of the break. My opinions were rarely that useful anyway. What I have to continue with, however, is the diversity stuff. There are some brilliant people making some brilliant progress with specific projects, but they still need a brilliant leader to blame if things go wrong. I think I can just about cope with being a brilliant but culpable leader so long as I keep to the gin and don’t get tempted to reply to emails. Today is a particularly exciting day on the diversity front. Mr Davies has started building us a Careers in Ideas website. I picture him in a hard hat and overalls, with his welding kit and a trowel, but apparently it is not that type of building, it is the arty-farty designer type with a bit of IT on the side. On the website there will be lots of ideas about careers in ideas and lots of careers ideas for those who need them. On the home page we are using the imagery that is not tech-y enough or masculine enough, with the too big too small writing. Elsewhere there will be the leaflet we have had written and the poster we have had designed, and school children and their advisers will be able to download all this super information and see for themselves what a brilliant idea it is to have a career in ideas. I hope you get the gist. Mr Davies says: I don’t like the font. It is not too big or too small, apparently; it is just too expensive. The arty-farty-with-IT-on-the-side professional designers picked it specially for us, being as they are pretty good at making careers out of ideas themselves. I have an idea too. I suggest we ditch the expensive font and go for a bog-standard one. Something a bit more tech-y, a bit more masculine: anything, in fact, except Comic Sans. 14 July 2016, 8 pm
At dinner I sit next to Professor Sir Robin Jacob. I have mentioned before that Sir Robin does not suffer fools gladly, so sitting next to me for three whole courses makes him very un-glad. Luckily, the person on his other side shares his interest in the Test Match, so they are able to look at Sir Robin’s mobile phone all evening to keep an eye on just how testing the match is, which is not half as testing as talking to me. I talk instead to the new Chair of IPReg. I tell her all about CIPA. She writes notes on the back of her menu when she thinks I’m not looking. Oh, but I am. After dinner we have a Famous Speaker. His name is Robin Ince and apparently he has been on telly a lot, but that means little to at least half the people in the room who have not watched live television since John Noakes left Blue Peter. Still, Mr Ince being a Serious Grade Celebrity (ie one that the rest of the world has heard of as well), even Sir Robin is moved to look up from his phone for a moment. Mr Ince gets hugely passionate about science, especially when you are paying him to do so. We must have accidentally paid the “After Dinner Speech with Extra Bounce” supplement because he does indeed appear to be bouncing at times, so passionate is he about wave-particle duality and the bollocks behind homeopathy. But thanks to Mr Davies’s briefing notes, he has well got the measure of tonight’s audience. He tells lots of geeky science jokes, but he tells them quickly so we don’t have time to question his accuracy. The jokes are about the Large Hadron Collider (which I think is a fairground ride) and Quantum Physics (which I think is a James Bond film) and Brian Blessed (which I think is something they sing at church, only MUCH MUCH LOUDER). Mr Ince also makes fun of Professor Brian Cox, which I think is just plain tactless because Mr Davies is in love with Brian Cox and it is Mr Davies who will be paying the speaker’s fees. Following Mr Ince’s getaway, the Black IPs take to the stage and we realise that Brian Blessed is actually a little on the QUIET SIDE compared to the noise levels Mr Roberts and his colleagues can generate. It is little wonder, in fact, that Mr Roberts is in charge at UNION-IP and that UNION-IP is always written in CAPITALS. Even our Chief Shouty Person Mr Lampert cannot make himself heard over the Black IPs. So we give up trying to talk to one another and take to the dance floor instead. The pleated corpse completes its death throes. By midnight I am so weary I don’t even mind that I’m sleeping in a wardrobe tonight. |
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