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.
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