10 January 2017, mid-day
I have spent the morning preparing for the EPO conference, by reading documents about university IP management. I discover there is a lot of helpful information about, from the IPO and the EPO and even the European Commission, telling universities what to put in their IP policies. I suspect, however, that the problem is not to do with what goes in the IP policy, so much as what the IP policy goes in. If it goes in a drawer somewhere and you do not tell either your students or your staff that it exists, then it is going to be about as much use as the CIPA Stapler Refilling Policy. Which I wrote one day when I was bored, and Mr Davies said Thank you that’s lovely, and filed it away under A for Andrea’s Junk. My research takes me to a recent survey of UK university students and staff. This revealed the not very surprising fact that many students do not know whether their institution has an IP policy or not, and those who know there is one cannot tell you what it says. Still others are not sure why IP policies are necessary, until you explain that they are generously donating their ideas to the public domain which is gratefully turning them into somebody else’s profit: then they take notice. To be fair, probably most of the CIPA staff do not realise we have a Stapler Refilling Policy either, and those who do are not aware that it requires Council’s permission for refills of more than 30 staples at a time. In this sense, the Legacy part of my Presidency has not been entirely successful.
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