2 December 2015, 11.30 am
Lunch is set out in the hall. But we are not allowed to start on the lunch until we have done lots of useful decision making. This is a meeting of CIPA’s Internal Governance Committee. You cannot do Internal Governance properly with a mouth full of bread roll. But the decision making goes on and on and the lunch smells good. It strikes me that you cannot do Internal Governance properly on an empty stomach either. So eventually, in desperation, I set aside the balance sheet I was perusing, and the profit and loss account with the £45.13 bill for releasing Mr Davies from the Congress lifts, and I reach for a sandwich. Following which, all hell breaks loose at the lunch table. Perhaps no one at CIPA is allowed to eat until the President has started eating. Let’s face it, that wouldn’t be unduly limiting with me as President. Going through the balance sheet and the profit and loss account establishes that we still have plenty of money (although only Spreadsheet Spurgeon knows where it all is, because it is kept in lots of different places so as to confuse us). We have something called a Cash Reserve, which is big enough to get us out of emergencies such as CIPA going belly-up or Mr Davies getting stuck in a lift again. It transpires that no one got permission for spending the £45.13 on Mr Davies last time, but the Committee feels able to grant permission ex post facto because this is not after all an argument about inventive step and anyway a Chief Executive cannot reach his full potential from behind a steel door in a lift shaft. Not even Mr Davies. From my point of view, the meeting is a most constructive one. I get permissions for things I’ve done but shouldn’t have done, and for things I haven’t done yet but would like to do, and even for some things I didn’t realise I ought to be doing but will do now. Result. (I think.)
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2 December 2015, 10 am
The Congress Steering Committee is holding its monthly meeting. Today we have some figures for the Financials. The Financials show that this year’s Congress only just broke even, or perhaps that it made a small loss: it depends a bit how you look at the spreadsheet. Also we spent £76.58 on balloons, and £45.13 getting Mr Davies out of the lift that morning they shut him in there (and wasn’t THAT worthwhile??). My job at the meeting is to ask difficult questions. For example: why do we bother? It seems to me that a lot of people bust a lot of guts to make the event happen (and gut-busting on this scale is a messy business, believe me) and yet still we only just break even. And this is maybe because there are not enough delegates there, so that in the networking breaks everyone has to network with the same people several times over, which is also a messy business and confusing to boot. Then I ask another difficult question: how about doing a one-day conference instead? This would have all sorts of benefits, chief among them that we would not need to go back to last year’s conference hotel with the non-compliant lifts. And then we think: perhaps we will have shorter networking sessions, because after all networking is a bit of a waste of time compared to proper serious CPD. And maybe we could have fewer panel discussions, because a panel discussion sometimes becomes an excuse for speakers not to prepare anything useful beforehand and just roll up for a chat, which again doesn’t compare well to proper serious CPD. Perhaps we will just do a single, full-on day of proper serious CPD sessions and Powerpoint® slides. During these deeply constructive discussions, the telephone – which is less a communications system than a random-thought-generating machine – assists by bringing us all manner of unwanted noises such as of people chewing, typing, answering the doorbell and shouting at their domestic staff, but appears incapable of transmitting good quality sound from CIPA Hall back to the people dialling in from Afar. It lobs in, on their behalf, random, disembodied contributions at random, unconnected moments, on topics we have either long finished discussing or never intended to discuss. These curve-balls are greeted with puzzled glances and shrugs, followed by ill-disguised attempts to bash the square pegs of randomness into the round holes of the agenda. It does not help the meeting progress smoothly. In the end, we come up with a Cunning Plan. The Cunning Plan is to hold another meeting to discuss the heretical thoughts in more detail. It will be a teleconference. Hmm. Great idea. Still, by CIPA standards, this is proper serious Progress. 1 December 2015
It’s official: advent has arrived at CIPA. The Christmas tree is up. It is a small Christmas tree, tastefully decorated on the theme of Austerity. To supplement it, someone has made garlands out of ruled faint A4 refill pads. I presume they have permission for these extravagances. In suitably festive spirit, I throw myself into a day’s worth of meetings, beginning at 9.30 am with some Very Important teleconferences that the Officers do not have permission for, and ending with a drink or two with the President of ITMA, that I did not dare seek permission for. I pay for my own gin and tonic, also a glass of wine for my companion. We decide that this Presidential Summit is an excellent opportunity to merge the two institutes while no one is looking. While we’re at it, we also make IPReg totally independent, finalise the new Trade Mark Attorneys’ Charter and sign up both professions to a compulsory risk assessment scheme. The next time we meet, it will be at the ITMA Christmas Lunch – which of course will have to be rebranded as the CIPTMA Independent Christmas Lunch and will not involve crackers, party poppers, tinsel (which could be used to strangle people), gift wrap (which you could die from, if you ate too much of it) or Christmas pudding (ditto). Be very afraid. If we can merge the institutes over a couple of evening drinks, just think what we could do over the brandy butter. 30 November 2015
Today it is the Grand Launch of the IP Inclusive diversity task force. Da-da-da-DAAAA!!! Because the task force does not actually have any money, just a lot of really well-meaning volunteers, we are borrowing someone’s meeting room for the occasion, and also their staff, their cloakroom, their chairs and tables and their drinks. In addition we are borrowing their IT system, although they cannot find the part of it that turns electrical signals into sound waves, but in the grand scheme of things that is a minor detail. Let’s face it, the alternative would have been to borrow a church hall somewhere. Mr Alty, who is in charge at the IP Office, has taken some time off from being in charge in order to deliver a keynote speech for us. This avoids the need for me to put the pirate dressing-up clothes on again, about which everyone concerned is mightily relieved. All I have to do is add some bits of wittering in between other people’s talks about what the task force has been up to. I am a pro at wittering. At the end of Mr Alty’s speech, there is a Grand Ceremonial Signing of the EDI Charter, which Unlucky Gary has printed out for us on posh paper. The posh paper is absolutely not nicked from the Law Society down the road. If it had been absolutely nicked from the Law Society, it would be tied up with pink ribbon. Mr Davies’s job is to let off the Ceremonial Party Poppers during the Grand Ceremonial Charter Signing. Mr Davies is a pro at party poppers. The people we have borrowed the room from try not to look cross about having to pick up bits of coloured paper noodles from all over the floor. Next we have a seminar about unconscious bias. Unconscious bias is when your brain tricks you into believing things for which there is no rational explanation. Like when you support a football team that never wins anything, or when you agree to go for just one drink with Mr Davies. The seminar includes some optical illusions to show how easily our brains can be duped. Actually the main thing these illusions demonstrate is that the brain can be made to think virtually anything so long as you put it in a Powerpoint® slide. It turns out that the picture that looks like a face is really the word “Liar” written on its side. I realise with some discomfort that my name badge has also slipped 90⁰ and that is perhaps why no one is taking me seriously today. But there could be other reasons. We are all guilty, the speaker says, of confirmation bias. This means we go looking for evidence in support of the conclusion we have irrationally jumped to on the basis of one Powerpoint slide. We will look very hard for this evidence, even if there is little of it. We are also guilty of “groupthink”, which means that we prefer to think what the other people in the room are thinking. This sounds reasonable to me, as a survival strategy. We are also guilty of stereotyping, and selective filtering, and of course (although the speaker did not specifically mention it today) splitting infinitives. I have to say I have not met many patent attorneys who are interested in groupthink; quite the opposite, in fact. But I do know we are guilty of stereotyping (all EPO examiners are out of their minds; anything to do with regulation is the Devil’s work) and of selective filtering (before we do our strategic review, let’s get the commas in the right place) and of confirmation bias (my client sold three of his scarecrows last week, therefore they must be inventive). Apart from me, of course. I do not go looking for evidence of any kind. Evidence is over-rated. Overall it is a really grand Grand Launch Event and I am extremely dead proud of what’s been achieved over the last eleven months, despite having me supposedly in charge. We haven’t made the IP professions completely diverse yet, but on the basis of the law of increasing entropy we have every reason to believe we’re heading in the right direction. Afterwards, a few of us go for just one drink with Mr Davies to celebrate. Skilful multi-tasking allows us to manage several just one drinks at once. By the end of the evening, none of us are heading in the right direction and the entropy levels are doing my head in. But hey, it was a Great Day. 27 November 2015, 1.30 pm
It is time for our twice-yearly visit from the nice man at the EPO, to check we still understand how much the EPO loves us and values our feedback. My job is to say the bit at the end about how much we love the EPO back. We hear all about making the examination process more efficient. One of the measures being adopted is that examiners are going to be encouraged to pick up the phone and speak to us, rather than always pretending to be on a coffee break when we call. What they are going to speak to us about, mainly, is not filing so many stupid auxiliary requests. But we have to file auxiliary requests! we cry. Because the Boards of Appeal will not let us file them later! The nice man says he is hoping the Boards of Appeal will change their position on this. His words are greeted by the sound of several patent attorneys being unconvinced at once. Mr Roberts says we have to keep auxiliary requests because the auxiliary request is what makes the EPO Special. It is not the only thing that makes the EPO Special, obviously. But it is still better than the American system, which is to file all your auxiliary requests as part of the same claim set and hope that only 145 of them are knocked out before grant. Then we talk about the EPO providing Little Helpers to assist patent attorneys with procedural stuff at hearings, for instance finding their passports and getting a cup of coffee and photocopying their auxiliary requests. We think the Little Helpers are a wonderful idea. We hope there will also be Little Helpers providing counselling for stressed patent attorneys before and after hearings, and pep talks and lemon barley water during the adjournments. Of course, the nice man from the EPO does not actually use the term “Little Helpers”; this is just my take on the concept. We also have a small disagreement about eDrex and OCR. This is a vital part of the twice-yearly visit and we would all feel cheated if we didn’t spend at least a few minutes on it. It has to be said that the disagreement gets a little more half-hearted each time it’s raised, because within a few years patent applications will be drafted, filed, examined and granted by artificially intelligent machines (as opposed to artificially intelligent people) and, frankly, they can sort out their own mistakes while we sit in our armchairs having 3D-printed pizzas delivered to us by Amazon®. By 4 o’clock it is getting dark outside and the nice man and his friend have to catch a plane back to Eponia. I say how much we love the EPO and he says how much he loves our feedback and we both know there is a slight lack of basis problem over these two assertions but in the interests of diplomacy, and of still being able to get our clients’ European patents granted, we smile graciously anyway. It is time for me to go home before I say something the others might regret. In any event, it is Black Friday. So I need to hurry back to the internet and do some shopping, because otherwise I can hardly call myself human can I? I presume that Black Friday is a particularly good day for the Dark Market, and am looking forward to some excellent deals on ransomware and phishing kits. |
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