17 March 2016, mid-day
The sun is shining in Dark Satanic Leeds. A perfect day to be sitting in a dingy room indulging a CPD fetish. The first session is about the UP and UPC. It is a double act. Our two speakers swap places every couple of slides, and sometimes they talk to one another’s slides by mistake, and sometimes they appear surprised that their turn has come round again so quickly, but overall it is a most engaging presentation format and I think it should be encouraged. One speaker can be deathly dull; two speakers plus a bit of rapport, plus a bit of under-rehearsed but energetic bobbing up and down, can turn a CPD ordeal into a spectacle. And as far as I can tell, there is nothing in the IPReg Code to say that CPD points are less valid if they are combined with a little entertainment. The speakers also require some audience participation, something which has become suspiciously popular at recent Yorkshire events. They provide us with a case study to discuss. At this point I discover I have some urgent Presidential emails to check, because I do not want people to find out that their President no longer has the slightest clue what to do with a patent case study. I return in plenty of time to announce the tea break, though, which I believe is the main reason for the President being at these events. After the tea break, we hear a talk from a tax advisor. It is about the Patent Box. The Patent Box has always been a teeny-weeny bit complicated, but soon it is going to get hugely-wugely complicated. It will become necessary to apply something called a Nexus Fraction to your Patent Box tax relief, and this you do by plucking several random figures out of your corporate accounts – some of which you will have to make up because you will have forgotten to write them down as you went along – and slotting them into the most eye-watering piece of algebra I’ve seen for some time. If you did not do further maths at A-level you are going to be seriously unhappy by this point, but when you realise that the only possible outcome of the algebra is a number less than one, and that this is the multiplier for your Patent Box relief, you will be even more unhappy. And then you will remember that you’ve paid an accountant many pounds to come up with this multiplier, thus obliterating even more of your profits, and you will be consumed with fury. Our final speaker tells us about IP insurance. Even if you did further maths to PhD level, there is no algebra in the world clever enough to calculate the risks that stem from IP litigation. So you might as well apply the Nexus Fraction here as well. There are a hundred and one ways to obliterate your profits: IP litigation and Nexus Fractions are only two of them.
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