25 January 2016, 10.30 am
I can’t remember why I thought it was a good idea to go to CIPA a day early this week. It may have been to do with spending some time with the hard-working CIPA staff, because I haven’t had much chance to do that recently. So here I am on a mid-morning train to London, which is an interesting experience, because on the mid-morning train you’re expected to stay awake and do work and stuff. I am more used to sparking out for the duration of the journey, and hoping that everyone else is also asleep so they won’t see me dribbling. To make sure we stay awake and do work and stuff, the Train Manager pops round at regular intervals to shout at people about their tickets. You have to do as you’re told by the Train Manager; he is in charge of the whole train, and everyone in it, and their bags and their tickets and whether or not they stay awake. The only two things he is not in charge of are (a) the hot bacon and tomato rolls (because this is the job of the Catering Manager) and (b) making the train start and stop (because this is the job of the Driver, with input from the signalling team, the local livestock, the weather and the gods). Since there isn’t a Platform-Train Interface Manager, every now and then the staff at Great Western Railways® have a little tiff about platform-related jobs, like shutting the train doors and blowing the whistle and chasing cyclists. This is how it works on trains these days. You get to know things like this when you commute.
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22 January 2016
Today I get to speak with none other than the Head STEMette. I feel like I have been waiting all my life for this moment. I am the Head Patent Attorneyette, I tell her; we can do great things together. The STEMettes’ role in life is to encourage girlies to put down their handbags and take up Bunsen burners and Van der Graaf generators instead. And then they would like the resultant Scientistettes and Engineerettes to get proper, well-paid, well-respected jobs, for instance as patent attorneyettes, like I did before I gave up paid work and devoted my life to volunteering at CIPA meetings. The STEMettes think there should be more to a woman’s career than fighting for maternity leave, being on maternity leave and covering for someone else’s maternity leave. I say: there is going to be a Women in IP networking event; would you like to come along and tell us about the STEMettes? I say: we do not have Bunsen burners or Van der Graaf generators, largely because the women who end up in IP have sussed that there are less dangerous ways of making a living out of STEM qualifications. But, I say, we might be able to help you, for instance by talking to girlies about IP, and giving them work experience in places where it’s OK not to blow yourself up once a week, and mentoring them and being role models and generally inciting them to put down their handbags. Only, obviously I can’t be a role model myself, partly because I don’t have a handbag but mainly because we don’t want STEMettes turning into gin-drinking, straw-shedding numpties now do we? The Head STEMette says: We have an App for the girlies; we could link the App to the Women in IP event. I say: No, you’ve lost me there, what’s an App? She says It’s on your phone, like your music and your Twitter® feed. I say: There’s music on my phone?? 20 January 2016, 4 pm
My final meeting of the day is the IP Exploitation Committee, which again I do through the medium of Dial-In and largely in screensaver mode. I do really want to contribute, but the sad fact is that these days I do little in the way of exploiting IP and IP does much in the way of exploiting me. However there is not a Presidential Exploitation Committee or even a Presidential Affairs Committee, or if there is they have not told me about it, for fear I might misinterpret my brief. The people on this committee know a lot about licensing and enforcement and international IP strategies and the importance of trade secrets. They also know a bit about IP valuation, or at least, enough to realise that no one really knows how IP valuation works except the self-professed experts and let’s face it they could be telling us anything. The committee resolves to find out more about this important but mysterious topic, before it becomes the biggest trade secret of all. 20 January 2016, 12.30 pm
I go for lunch with Unlucky Gary. I want to ask him what Mr Davies is up to these days, but it turns out he doesn’t know either. We think it may be something to do with the revised updated Strategic Plan. But we did hear the sound of a kettle boiling earlier, which is a concern. 20 January 2016, 1.30 pm Now I am at a meeting of the Regulatory Affairs Committee. It used to be called the Regulatory Responses Committee, but it got fed up of being passive, so then it briefly became the Regulatory Answering Back Committee before deciding that actually, forget being there at other people’s beck and call, let’s do Affairs, which are far more dashing and derring. The Committee’s first job is to decide how it would like to conduct its regulatory Affairs. It plans to draft a CIPA regulatory strategy and a CIPA regulatory position paper, and then ask Mr Davies to revise and update them both. Mr Davies lifts his head out of the kettle and says No Way. I remind everyone in the room that it matters little what CIPA puts in its regulatory anything, because the people in charge of regulation are not exactly rushing to ask CIPA how to do it. Still, everyone says, we ought to know what we would want out of regulation in an ideal world. Which is kind of like me knowing what I would want out of the CIPA Presidency in an ideal world. Next we talk about the process for appointing the new IPReg Chair. IPReg have designed a process. They said to CIPA: here’s the process we designed. CIPA interpreted this to mean: please tell us what you think of the process we designed. This was CIPA’s first mistake. CIPA’s second mistake was writing to IPReg setting out what it thought of the process they’d designed. IPReg considered this for a while, and then wrote to CIPA saying, essentially: we did not ask you what you thought of it; we are doing it anyway. Now the Regulatory Affairs Committee has a dilemma. Option one is the namby-pamby one advocated by – you’ve guessed it – the CIPA Pee. It involves letting go and moving on (or, in the eyes of my colleagues, backing down and wimping out), because the design is not that bad and no one is going to die as a result of it and if we write back to IPReg saying You are stupid not to listen to us and your design is stupid too, that will be our third mistake. In a few weeks’ time we have got to sit down with IPReg and start interviewing candidates, and it would look bad if the two halves of the interviewing panel sat with their backs to each other. Option two is the standard CIPA approach. It involves – you’ve guessed it – writing back to IPReg saying You are stupid not to listen to us and your design is stupid too, and we demand that this outrage cease forthwith or we will – we will – er, we will sit with our backs to you on the interviewing panel. I am, of course, outvoted. I am told to draft a rude letter, of the type that anyone would be proud to receive from their worst enemy at the start of an important appointment procedure. The others will help me make it rude enough. I am not to send it until they have done so. 20 January 2016, 9 am
My train is going very slowly, so that its passengers can enjoy the view. Whether they like it or not. I have to say, it looks fabulous outside as the landscape wakes up, far better than it does inside as the passengers wake up. There are frosty fields and there is misty salmon-pink sunlight and really the only downside is that we wanted to get to London not go on safari. People exchange thoughts about how late they’re going to be and the alternative travel plans they’ll have to make. Then they Touch Base with their Stakeholders. If there’s one thing guaranteed to increase your stress levels it’s the sound of people huffing angrily into their phones about being important and influential but essentially not there on time. My first CIPA meeting is with a lovely man from Queen Mary College, about the EPLC course he and his colleagues are hoping to build. The lovely man is a professor already. Professors look so young these days. It is not easy building an EPLC course. You have to get it accredited, and to do this you have to apply to an accrediting authority that does not yet exist, and prove to them that your course includes all manner of useful content for instance about EU law, different infringement provisions across continental Europe, what the CJEU is there for and the related issue of why SPCs are so difficult. Your course has to include 120 hours of teaching, some of which can be done remotely but all of which must require the students to have their eyes open. There must be a written exam and an oral exam, and an induction ceremony that involves Jaegerbombs and underpants although not a pig’s head. OK, so I made that last bit up. Anyway, because it is not easy building an EPLC course, we are hoping that we can help Queen Mary build theirs rather than have to do one of our own. This makes perfect sense to us. At the beginning of the meeting, it makes perfect sense to the lovely man from Queen Mary too. But then the patent attorneys start debating the finer points of the UPC rules of procedure, and the lovely man starts to look doubtful. Once again, we are demonstrating our profession’s unique ability to get straight to the nitty-gritty details, and in the process forget what it was we were supposed to be deciding. 19 January 2016
I attend a meeting of the Trade Marks Committee, through the medium of a “dial-in”. This means that I am there in spirit if not in body. And I do not mean the gin type of spirit. Sadly. Some of the time I am there in mind as well as in spirit. However, these days my brain has adopted the unnerving habit of going into screensaver mode unless constantly provoked, during which it fills with pictures of bubbly, floaty things, like the inside of a gin and tonic for example, and then everything shuts down without saving. The Chair of the Trade Marks Committee knows this, because he saw it happen in the WIPO meetings last week. In order to save me the embarrassment of snoring down the phone line today, he nudges me into life every now and then by asking my Presidential opinion on something. The coming into life process takes a few seconds, and the un-muting of the phone takes a few seconds more, as does the mental trawling to identify which agenda item is supposedly being discussed, so the Presidential opinion can at times seem a little tardy. Personally, I prefer to think of the delay as a “statesmanlike” pause. But I don’t think I’m fooling anyone. 18 January 2016
I am feeling most virtuous. I have written my thank you notes for Friday’s meetings with WIPO. What a well-brought-up person I am! (I have not yet done my Christmas thank you notes, mind, but that is another matter entirely.) In my thank you notes to WIPO, I expressed my appreciation for the espressos as well as for the dapper appearance of the man who served them. I said Thank you for letting us join in your Don’t Stop Talking game, and congratulations on your unquestionable victory we are not smarting at all. Oh, yes, and the discussions about harmonisation were quite useful too. Next I am going to write an email to Mr Davies, to explain how the Don’t Stop Talking game works and how we are going to use it in the February Council meeting. 15 January 2016, 5 pm
We return to the airport and several thousands of miserable skiers. They are miserable because they are going home. Not all of them are able to walk properly. The others head off to drink bubbly in the executive lounge. I buy plenty of CHOCOLATE – including that instructed by my geographically-disengaged teenage daughter – and then make for the EasyJet® queue, since I am travelling back to Bristol pleb-class. I think it is safer to avoid executive lounges because if you spend too long in an executive lounge you can end up with Airmiles. I do not want to get Airmiles; it sounds nasty. Fortunately, the EasyJet Geneva flight is a cut above the usual EasyJet offering. People who can afford to visit Geneva in January are not your average plebs. They may not be able to slide down a snowy mountain without shattering their own or somebody else’s knee joint, but they know what a fondue is and that salopettes are not something you dip in it. The flight is a most well-mannered affair, and nobody catches Airmiles. 15 January 2016, 1 pm
We have enjoyed three hours’ worth of high-level, high-temperature meetings with the Director General and his pals. They don’t seem phased by the disappearance of the dapperly-uniformed espresso man or by the waffle-iron temperatures. We, however, are flagging. But we are British so we do not like to say. In the meetings we played a game called Don’t Stop Talking. This game was invented a long time ago by a powerful but insecure male of the species, who was worried that if he stopped talking, someone else might disagree with him, thus undermining his credibility, dignity and virility, and in turn annihilating an entire belief system, to the detriment of the many subordinates who had thus far flourished under it. The game is still popular in many modern business cultures and our hosts today play it with eye-watering, molar-grinding skill. My colleagues assure me that the meetings were nevertheless very productive meetings. They remind me that I have taken loads of notes and that when I could get a word in – ie when one of the other players forgot himself and drew breath – I offered to provide several people with various nonspecific forms of support. Luckily my colleagues did not see that my notes were punctuated by sketches of coffee cups and light refreshments. Luckily it is not my turn to provide a report for Council. Now we are meeting the IPO’s attaché at WIPO. Until recently, I had not realised the IPO had an attaché at WIPO. I knew they had an attaché in China, and one in Brazil, but not that they treated WIPO as a country in its own right, like Vatican City or something. (I am not suggesting we should have an IP attaché in Vatican City, obviously; somehow I don’t imagine The Almighty is that interested in IP, having created an entire universe and never received so much as a penny in royalties.) Something else that occurs to me is that where there is a diplomatic attaché, there is also usually an undercover agent, secretly gathering counter-intelligence and feeding it back home. Quite possibly it is the dapperly-uniformed espresso man. Anyway, the attaché – who is not undercover – recognises how hungry and parched we look and nobly leads the way to the WIPO canteen. Here there are fifteen or so dapperly-uniformed spies I mean chefs offering all manner of good things to eat. We load up our trays and spend a happy hour finding out what an IP attaché does for a living. By the end of the conversation, I confess I still have only a hazy idea of the man’s brief, but I offer him various nonspecific forms of support and he seems more than happy to leave it at that. 15 January 2016, 10 am
Some myths I can now explode about Switzerland:
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