30 June 2016, 4 pm
Now it is time for a teleconference about our new Women in IP network. We have been trying to organise this for some time, only the women in IP were busy. As it is, we can only fit in this teleconference by doing our ironing at the same time. Our first task is to organise a launch event. We wonder whether we should have a single, hot-shot, high-flying speaker to inspire us, or a panel of speakers from different backgrounds, some of whom are hot-shot and high-flying and some of whom are ordinary. We decide that sometimes it is a bit wearying, being inspired by hot-shot high-flyers. So a panel will be better, and we will include some ordinary women on it, and people like me, who cannot even hold down a proper job let alone juggle it with being a domestic goddess. We have to finish at 5 pm so that we can all go off and collect our children or cook tea, or finish our patent drafts before we cook tea, or in my case find out what’s happened to Grandma. It goes without saying that we have each of us been doing at least two other things during the teleconference. We are women. We can multi-task. Our brains are specially wired for this. Personally I think we should have some hot-shot, high-flying men on the launch event panel. They will be able to let us in on their Secrets of Success, for example how to get away with doing only one thing at a time and people still thinking you’re brilliant. And how convenient it is to have a brain that is specially wired for not doing more than one thing at a time, this being a perfect reason to be left alone to concentrate on the one thing while other people with multi-wired – although clearly inferior – neurological apparatus juggle the rest of life’s petty problems in the background.
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30 June 2016, 2 pm
It is time for our Special Council Meeting. We must decide what CIPA is going to do about Brexit, other than cry. My elder son is home from uni, and has kindly volunteered (no, really) to take the wheelchair for a spin. I remind him to take Grandma with it, also the anorak. And no, I say, it is not an all-terrain vehicle. Me, I have a big pile of ironing to do, which should see me nicely through the meeting. I am only dialling in, after all. If I put the phone on mute they need never know I am being a domestic goddess at the same time. I am a woman; I can multi-task. It is a constructive meeting. Many Council members have turned out for it – apart from the slackers like me, of course, who couldn’t be bothered to travel to London and wanted to be home for the football. First we talk about What Will Happen to the UPC Now? We decide that we are roughly in favour of the UPC continuing, which I kind of thought went without saying but it feels better to have a proper Council decision on it. We are not yet sure by what mechanism the UPC will continue, but it’s the thought that counts. Then we talk about What Will Happen to Trade Marks Now? And Designs? And Copyright? And Plant Variety Rights? And the Nagoya Protocol? And we cannot agree on the answers to these questions, which is funny really because I am sure the people in charge of implementing the Brexit vote – the people within Her Majesty’s Most Noble and Wise Government – have meticulous plans for such things. Then someone says: But what if English ceases to be an official EU language? And we laugh, because such a thing would be Ridiculous and Outrageous and almost certainly Impossible. But there is a hint of nervousness in our laughter, because we thought pretty much the same about a Brexit vote. Finally, we talk about all the shouty things that Mr Lampert has prepared about Brexit, and all the shouty things he should prepare next, like a shouty video for example. Mr Davies and Mr Lampert are going to set up a special part of the CIPA website for these shouty things, so that everyone can see what CIPA is going to do about Brexit, other than cry. This special part of the website will be called a Landing Page, on account of that is the technical term for special parts of websites these days. I suspect it will not be a very full Landing Page. I suspect that anyone who lands there is going to feel pretty lonely. But it will be more informative than anything Her Majesty’s Most Noble and Wise Government has said about its Brexit plans thus far. 29 June 2016
My mother is staying with us. If it were sunny we would plonk her in the garden with a nice cup of tea and a book to fall asleep over (which would be the same book she fell asleep over last summer but claims never to have seen before), and she would while away the day charting the progress of the cat and its bottom from shady patch to shady patch. She and the cat would exchange updates and confidences, in the way that only people who talk to animals know how, and later she would share these updates with us over tea, transposed into Things She Read in the Paper. But it is not sunny. So we have to think of more imaginative things to do. I settle on a gentle shopping trip to Weston-super-Mare, which is about all I can face; my mother needs a wheelchair to get around and the wheelchair needs someone to push it. Actually, the wheelchair arrangement suits us both. She goes exactly where I want her to (being otherwise easily distracted by side roads, passing strangers, colourful things in shop windows and anything that mentions The Queen). She goes there at a decent speed – in fact, if I’m feeling particularly stressed, she goes there at one hell of a speed, and is virtually catapulted into the shop/café/toilet cubicle she chooses to stop at. When things get embarrassing, for example due to unwelcome interactions with passing strangers, I can wheel her away quickly. But more to the point, we do not have to look at one another while she talks. It is better that way. My expression is not that of your usual devoted carer. My face is especially grim when my mother announces she wants coffee and cake, and we end up in a coffee shop surrounded by the generation that voted to stick two fingers up at Continental Europe. It makes me cross that they are still consuming Danish pastries and Italian-style coffees with such catholic gusto. 24 June 2016
Today I realise:
We hold an early morning teleconference, the other officers and Mr Davies and Mr Lampert and I. Mr Lampert has prepared a shouty thing called a press release, with CIPA’s official response to the Brexit vote. It is a tad more restrained than my own response to the Brexit vote. We help Mr Lampert to make it more accurate, and more comprehensive. We continue this process throughout a lengthy subsequent email conversation. Eventually Mr Lampert is allowed to publish the shouty thing, following which the rest of the membership take up the baton and help him to make it even more accurate and comprehensive. By the time the official CIPA position on Brexit has reached all its intended audiences, even my local charity shop will have published a FAQ booklet. The Pee decides we must hold a Special Council Meeting next week, to talk some more about Brexit. I suspect this will be a miserable and bad-tempered affair, but Council has to be given sufficient opportunity to be miserable and bad-tempered when important things happen, otherwise people become, well, miserable and bad-tempered. There is also an urgent need to clarify exactly what is meant, in the CIPA shouty document, by “at least two years”. There are already dark mumblings to the effect that this figure might be insufficiently precise, or worse, inaccurate, or that it might be only partially accurate in which case we should include a caveat explaining the extent to which it is accurate. I do not think Mr Lampert is looking forward to the Special Council Meeting. After the Special Council Meeting, we are going to ask Mr Lampert to ring the national media, to provide a more accurate and comprehensive summary of the official CIPA position on What We Don’t Know About Brexit Yet. No, he is definitely not looking forward to it. Mr Davies, meanwhile, having just about resigned himself to the word “Brexit” despite its ugliness, is now wishing he hadn’t. He wasn’t expecting to have to use it quite this much. 22 June 2016
I have some new glasses. I mean the type that correct your vision, not the type that hold gin and tonic and therefore don’t assist your vision at all. The new glasses are called “varifocals”. You are only allowed these when you are too old and weary to complain about not being able to see. Because this is the principle on which varifocals work. There is a small region in which things that are 6.2 metres away can be seen in pin-sharp detail. There is a small region in which things that are 18.4 cm away can be seen in pin-sharp detail. In between, and all around the edges, are regions in which everything swims hazily in no kind of detail at all. When you move your eyes, the world bends. Therefore you are not allowed to move your eyes. At least, not without moving your whole head as well, so as to maintain focus on the pin-sharp detailed object that is precisely 6.2 metres away and that you must not lose sight of because it is your only reliable point of reference and without it you will fall over. I had kind of got into the habit of moving my eyes in order to see things. It does not come naturally to stop. I traverse the kitchen with robot-like pin-sharp precision and impatience, unnerving my family no end by taking three seconds to bring their faces into range before I speak to them. When I speak I say: “I hate my new glasses. Where is my gin?” Eventually I promise the youngest one extra pocket money to follow me round all evening, holding a gin and tonic precisely 18.4 cm away from the focal point of my right lens. He is happy to oblige. 15 June 2016
I summon a teleconference for the working group leaders from the IP Inclusive task force (da-da-da-DA!). I say: What have you been doing in your working groups recently? Only, we have a big meeting coming up and we are supposed to report back to the other task force members. They say: We have not made as much progress as we’d have liked. Because we have been busy with our Proper Jobs. And because all the other task force members, who said they would like to be involved, have actually turned out to have Proper Jobs as well. I say: I think I had a proper job once. Now I am available on a consultancy basis. Only not this month, because I am enjoying having time to watch the washing machine go round again. My family, in the background, say: No, really, she’s available today. Take her away today, they say. They do not agree that their socks need washing ten times a week. 13 June 2016, 1 pm
Thinking that lunch will involve more buffet-style croissanterie and coffee-throwing, I forget to turn up at the start. By the time I arrive, everyone else is seated and half-way through their starter. There is one free table, with twelve places set, and I am the only person on it. This is not good for my street cred. Two of the AIPLA people kindly bring their plates and sit either side of me, whether to keep me company or to keep me in check I am not sure. Either way, I am grateful. They proceed to have a debate about Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton, from which it emerges that it is a Good Thing that I am sitting between them as otherwise there might be a fight. I eat my salad and brush fluff off my skirt, like a good Brit, and every now and then I throw in a comment about the weather which, although rainy, is at least not the fault of either of the US Presidential candidates. After lunch, we all check our smartphones again, to the accompaniment of various presentations on US IP law. In particular we learn about means-plus-function language in US patent claims. Apparently it is no good trying to pretend that a signalling unit or a signalling system or even a signal box is any better than a “signalling means”. It is in fact better to fill your claims with as much waffle as possible, like I do, for example “a light or a bell or something a bit similar”. (I am available on a consultancy basis, should you want to outsource your international drafting and prosecution work.) 13 June 2016, 11 am
After breakfast we had to start work again. So now I am sitting at a large table in another part of the Inn of Court, with some senior CIPA folk and some other senior acronyms such as ITMA, FICPI-UK, the IPLA and in particular the AIPLA. The AIPLA are the American people: you can tell because despite their jet lag, they are all Leaning In and Reaching Out. Whereas the Brits are brushing fluff off their trousers and looking studious. We are all gathered together to check our emails and Twitter® accounts and global newsfeeds. Now and then someone stands up and gives a little presentation on something, like IP strategies post-UPC, and what’s happening in trade mark law in the European Union that we might or might not be a member of, but fortunately none of this detracts from the important work we are doing on our smartphones. One of the speakers is an IP judge. But I do not think he is a proper judge because he says IP litigation can be run sensibly and can be constructive and even sometimes quite good fun. Clearly he is making this up. I am the only person in the room who seems to realise. We also have a talk from the IPO, about what they are doing to raise public awareness of IP. What they are doing is making video clips to show to children in classrooms, and workbooks for teachers who are brave enough to do this and then need to answer the questions that follow. The IPO are so excited about their Teach-the-World-About-IP campaign that they plan to roll it out in holiday camps over the summer. Imagine that! It’s a rainy day, and your children are bored and demanding extra burgers and fizzy drinks, and wanting to try out the £45-a-go indoor heated water slide and wave pool, and hurrah! instead you can take them to see a free video about patents and trade marks. They will be delighted. What next, I wonder? IP – The Ride at a theme park near you?? 13 June 2016
It is a year since our last Diversity in IP breakfast meeting, and people are getting hungry again. So, since the AIPLA are visiting London, we have organised a repeat. Only this year, I have been told not to use any silly gardening metaphors in my speech. Out of deference to the social mobility agenda, or perhaps more accurately the social nobility agenda, we are holding this year’s breakfast in an oak-panelled banqueting hall in a 14th Century Inn of Court. In amongst the oak panels, there are dusty portraits of not-very-diverse but definitely dusty men, who have at various times in England’s dignified history been eminent enough to be allowed to look down their oil-painted noses at future generations of diners. There are also some uniformed servants scurrying around serving coffee, which is the nearest you get to social mobility, or indeed any kind of mobility, in an oak-panelled banqueting hall. Out of deference to the gender agenda – if you’ll excuse the poetry – the heavy oak dining tables are flanked by long heavy oak benches. If you are wearing a frock, it is difficult to insinuate yourself onto one of these benches without revealing, to people you are insufficiently intimate with to warrant the revelation, undeniable proof of your femaleness. This is bad news for women like me, who have got on in life by claiming to have more, er, male bits than their colleagues, and can now be seen not to have any male bits at all. At least we are not serving bacon for breakfast, which would have offended people of certain religions, or black pudding, which would have offended pretty much everybody. And if we vote for a Brexit on 23 June, next year’s Diversity in IP breakfast will be limited to toast and marmalade anyway: we will certainly not be allowed to serve croissants because croissants are European and will offend the patriots. The breakfast is extremely well attended. I tell myself this is because an extremely lot of people are interested in diversity, and not because the breakfast is extremely free and therefore more attractive, today at least, than the Starbucks® down the road. The attendees include men, women and even some foreigners; a free breakfast is a great leveller. Also attending is a certain Mr Darren Smyth, who adds to the diversity on two scores: first, he is an IP Kat, and therefore the only representative of the wider animal kingdom, and second, he is wearing a waistcoat so multi-coloured that you feel like you’re looking at it through a prism. It is a joyous, vibrant waistcoat, the kind that happens when the people making it forget to stop, and it single-handedly raises diversity levels in the room by 300%. If I were a bloke, I might have to kill Mr Smyth and steal it. But I am not a bloke – see above. After the uniformed servants have demonstrated their servility by throwing coffee into my saucer from a great height and only narrowly missing my, er, missing male bits, it is time for the speeches. First up is me. I put on my strict voice and tell the breakfasters that they have to start thinking a bit more about other people, especially the not-normal people from the minority groups, so that we can make them feel more welcome and more comfortable and generally be more Inclusive. This, I say, is at the heart of a happy, diverse community. I say, in essence: you cannot go around offering Muslims alcoholic drinks and inviting Jews to Friday evening meetings and asking people in wheelchairs to pop to London for the day. You cannot tell female colleagues to have babies because you feel it would do them good, or advise gay trainees not to come out before the next pay review. It just isn’t tactful. I also say: it is about time we recognised how embarrassingly privileged most of us are, compared to the not-normal people in our midst. Not everyone, I say, knows a chardonnay from a sauvignon blanc. Not everyone speaks Latin. Shocking, but true. As instructed, I do not use any metaphors. In some of these contexts the reality is bizarre enough anyway. And luckily, even with my strictest strict voice and my glariest glare, I do not appear to have put anyone off their European croissants. I do however suspect that the dusty old portraits are sneering. Next, someone from the AIPLA tells us what they are doing on the diversity front. Being American, they are of course much more proactive about all this. They are Reaching Out and Leaning In and generally Bending Over Backwards to accommodate not-normal people, including the ones without male bits, ie Women in IP, for whom there is a whole committee. The British express support for one another in a more upright manner, except when they get drunk together, when they offer huge amounts of Reaching Out and Leaning In and Falling Over, but this kind of support is less useful and you are not allowed to rely on it the following day. One of the great things the AIPLA’s Women in IP Committee does is to make sure conference speaker panels are at least partly female. I am not sure how they do this, because we all know that there is a shortage of decent female speakers, and anyway women usually decline invitations to be on panels, and this is probably because their brains are not wired right for public speaking. You only have to look at the average conference programme to see this is the case. Still, I instantly resolve to copy all of the Americans’ ideas in our IP Inclusive Women in IP group. I also resolve to include as part of the Bending Over Backwards initiatives a women-only training course on Dressing for Success, or rather, Dressing To Avoid Embarrassment, for example the embarrassment of providing inappropriate disclosure of one's, er, male bits. Or lack thereof. Our final speaker tells us about the IP Inclusive Charter and what we’re going to do for the people who’ve signed up to it, which is to put on our strict voices and tell them to be nice to one another. It is not a difficult Charter to commit to: it does not ask you to do anything much other than be nice to other people; I am quite cross that some firms have not signed up to it yet. Luckily it is not me doing the talk about the Charter. The person who is doing the talk about the Charter says all sorts of encouraging things about providing the signatories with updates and guidance and access to useful resources, and sharing best practices within the community. She sounds almost American. I would be heart-warmed but I am British so I stick to a polite twitch of the lips in support. Afterwards, various people come up to me to say they liked my speech but. The “but” typically relates to the concern that if we open our profession to lots more people, we might accidentally dilute our impeccably high standards though we do say it ourselves. We do not want to pave the way for mediocrity, after all. I refrain from pointing out that centuries of white middle class male dominance has not exactly stemmed the tide of mediocrity either. Some folk also say: but not-normal people are not good enough at English to be proper IP professionals, and that is why they cannot join our impeccably wonderful profession though we do say it ourselves. And I think: With reference to the foregoing, my learned friend will appreciate that such a contention has heretofore been incontrovertibly proven to be a load of, er, male bits. A profession that will happily define a piece of technology using no verbs and scant punctuation, characterised in that it will happily write a letter which begins “With respect, it is submitted that”? Just how good at English do we want the not-normal people to be?? Sometimes I think we should forget the whole diversity agenda and go right back to basics. All IP professionals should have to undertake humility training. Plus a minimum of sixteen hours a year in the real world. And occasionally, a smack across the face. Thankfully, there are many, many extremely nice people at the breakfast, who offer their support and encouragement and don’t seem fazed by the idea of being nice to others. So, replete with European pastries and a saucerful of coffee, I end the meeting feeling totally pleased with myself and full of optimism for IP Inclusive. I might not have any, er, male bits. I might have been sneered at by dusty, oil-painted eminencies. But we are going to make the IP professions more diverse and inclusive, even if we have to reach out and lean in and bend over each other to do it. I relish the challenge. |
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