20 April 2016, 2 pm
I have got dressed properly and now the VeePee and I are giving a talk to some university law students. Our title is “IP at the coal face”. This means different things to each of us. For the VeePee, who worked in Big Pharma, the coal face was a rich seam with a thriving colliery astride. For me, the coal face was more of a bucket and spade job. So, the VeePee tells the students about the value of IP to the economy, and about socio-economic models for incentivising innovation and growth. He explains different types of IP strategy, and options for monetising your intangible assets. He speaks of global licensing deals and high-stakes litigation. He shows pie charts and matrices, cites research papers and data. Then it is my turn. I tell them what it is like to be in private practice with a whole range of clients, from those who haven’t a clue about business plans to those who think they are the Devil’s work. Some of these clients, I say, have a good idea but no business. Others have a business but rubbish ideas, particularly when it comes to choosing distinctive trade marks or designing the next must-have consumer product. Some of them, to be honest, just pop by for a chat because they’re lonely. I speak about the clients who walk straight in from the farmyard with their latest invention, which is an apple-powered scarecrow with a gravity-defying anti-badger torpedo mechanism and an angular momentum-busting, Bluetooth®-enabled orientation widget, to whom I say “Hmm. Well. It’s a very nice scarecrow” and they say, “No, that’s not the scarecrow, that’s my dad.” In this way, I give the students a feel for the real-world application of IP and its impact on the Wess Curntry economy, ie, none. Next I take them through a case study I made up, in which I judiciously refrained from mentioning scarecrows and cider-based medicinal formulations, so as to safeguard client confidentiality. The VeePee reads my case study with his usual critical eye and says I have written it like a patent attorney exam paper. I ignore him because actually the case study is doing a very good job of illustrating the diverse IP and business issues that a real-life practitioner has to think about. It has also reminded the students how lucky they are to be studying law in a nice clean university, rather than getting their hands dirty at the intellectual property coal face. At 4 pm the students decide it is time to stop checking their WhatsApp® feeds and go for a drink. I ask if there are any further questions but they have already sussed I don’t have an awful lot of answers, so we all cut our losses. The VeePee and I head back to the coal face.
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