8 March 2016, 10 am
So excited is Mr Davies at the prospect of getting a proper President soon, he has already sent out instructions for my name to be added to the board of Past Presidents. He may be hoping that if he can get my name up there quickly, I will de facto no longer be the Pee, and he will de facto no longer have to put up with me. CIPA has a Standard Operating Procedure for adding to the board of Past Presidents. It involves contacting The Gold Leaf Man and asking him to pop by with some more of his beautifully-formed, gold-plated calligraphy. Or at least a gold marker pen. I confess I had thought there were Gold Leaf Pixies to do this sort of thing. I thought they would pass by in the dead of night after the AGM, flitting amongst the recumbent bodies of CIPA members who forgot to stop toasting the new President and got locked in by the cleaners, and magic the new EyePeePee’s name onto the board. It is disappointing that there are no pixies involved. But I guess The Gold Leaf Man must also be a little bit magical, kind of like Santa Claus or The Sandman or the BFG. And anyway, I am relieved they are considering adding my name at all. They would have been well within their rights to leave a blank space for this year and try to forget it ever happened. Apparently there is nothing in the Bye-laws that says the writing has to be gold, so we are considering breaking with tradition and having something more colourful this time. Perhaps even sparkly. I would pay a lot of money to see Council members’ faces when they looked up at the board and saw that. And it would be, somehow, appropriate, no?
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8 March 2016, 9 am
Today (it being International Women’s Day) we traditionally give some thought to what it is to be a woman. And why anyone bothers. We also think about why it is that being a woman is, on average, less profitable than being a man. I am loathe to conclude that telling people they are incompetent nincompoops and addressing them like peasants is a higher-value activity than pouring oil on troubled waters and supplying cake and biscuits, but there is every indication that this is the case. The gender pay gap may indeed be due to namby-pambiness differentials. Anyway, I have now answered some of yesterday’s bad-tempered emails. I began most of my answers by apologising for being an incompetent nincompoop. This is called taking the moral high ground. 7 March 2016, 6 pm
I check my emails on the train home. It is a pretty bad-tempered collection. I know I am particularly grumpy, because I have been surviving on little more than some frothy coffee things, a non-chocolate-coated breakfast and some high-level agenda items (and I was not supposed to eat the agenda items anyway), but really. There are complaints about CIPA. There are angry chasers to the staff. There are dark, amorphous grumblings which seem to imply that the plight of the world in general might lie at the feet of our Institute and the incompetent nincompoops who run it. People are outraged. They are compelled to complain in the strongest terms. They expect immediate and satisfactory explanations failing which they will, they will, er, they will feel compelled to complain in even stronger terms to even more people. They are, in fact, incensed. And because I am tired and grumpy myself, and rattling back and forth, unpaid, along the country’s train tracks in the interests of these intolerant, brusque and negative people, I find myself wondering: what kind of profession am I serving? I know that patent attorneys are all hyper-intelligent mega-beings but surely they are supposed to be good communicators as well? Why address people like they’re peasants employed to clear the gutters? Guess what, folks, if you are respectful and considerate and you try to imagine how pathetically small the other human being might feel on reading your email (and yes, unfortunately it is another human being reading the email, and this abundance of human beings in the working world explains why there are so many mistakes and disappointments to cope with), then you can tailor your approach and you can actually win their support. But if you tell them they are an incompetent nincompoop – even if you disguise that sentiment with 101 clever nuances and passive verbs and a veneer of Latin – they are not going to be inclined to help you out of a hole. This may be why the examiner still won’t let you have claim 1. It may be why you’ve been called to oral proceedings. It may be why your colleague is writing his letter of resignation. Oh yes he is. For once, I do not attempt to answer these emails, because I am fed up of pouring oil on troubled waters for people who will reply by throwing a match at it. Let them rage on. 7 March 2016, 2 pm
Now I am in the IPO meeting. It is the “Four Presidents” meeting that they hold twice a year for the Pees of CIPA, ITMA, FICPI-UK and the IP Federation. And they have to hold it even if the CIPA Pee is not really up to the job. One of the agenda items is the EU referendum. We ask the IPO what they think about Brexit. They say Mr Cameron recommends that we stay in the EU. We say yes but what if The People vote to leave? They say Mr Cameron recommends that we stay in the EU. But what if we have to leave, we ask: what will become of the CTM, and the UPC, and all the other acronyms that depend on the UK being linked to Brussels? They say Mr Cameron recommends that we stay in the EU. The IPO have a script and are not allowed to deviate from it, and no amount of cajoling by patent and trade mark attorneys is going to change their minds. So we talk instead about the EPO and WIPO and about the UPC (which will be fine, obviously, because Mr Cameron recommends that we stay in the EU), and also about all the things which the IPO and BIS are doing to raise awareness of IP among UK businesses. And we talk about the IPO’s five-year strategy and its five-year operational plan and the various consultations it is involved with. And I find myself wondering how anyone finds the time to examine patent applications when they have so many documents to write. That may be why there’s a teeny-weeny bit of a backlog. But 50 more examiners are being recruited in September and before we know it, search reports will be issuing quicker than the Onssek’s commas. We also talk about the IPO’s plan to encourage trading in IP assets. I wish I knew enough about economics to understand why this makes me nervous. Possibly I am uneasy because I remember about futures and derivatives and the real estate bubble. Call me paranoid, but I have this vague notion that when traders get involved in things, the things themselves cease to be important and all that matters is that the names of the things get moved a lot from one person’s list to another person’s list so that a third person can make commission. And that if someone else can pretend there has been a change in the value of the things when they moved, or that there might be a change in value of the things at some unspecified time in the future, the traders can make a lot of money without the owners of the things benefitting at all; in fact at some point the owners of the things may well find they can no longer afford to own the things they thought they owned because of what the traders said about their value. And I think (because I am paranoid): if traders can do all that with bricks and mortar – if they can bring down global economies by persuading people that the walls they can actually physically bang their heads against can be represented by whatever random number a well-suited office clerk decides on – just think what they could do with intellectual property assets, which are not tangible at all, and for which not even the experts can provide a non-random value. And I also think (because I am cynical as well as paranoid): what a fantastic wheeze this would be for the government. It wouldn’t matter whether we actually did anything or made anything in the UK. We could discover all sorts of IP assets in our corporate accounts; we could value them however we liked (thus reversing the national debt overnight); and then we could establish a thriving industry to trade in those assets. We could move them from place to place; we could sell options and insurance, potential future increases in value and derivatives of future litigation settlements, and all manner of financial fictions. And each transaction would bring funds into the UK’s trading sector, which – being adept at such things – would duly dispose of its disposable income and revitalise our consumer economy. No wonder the IPO are being roped in to help. Everyone should be roped in to help. If he can pull this off, Mr Cameron won’t much care whether we stay in the EU or not. London will be the global capital of IP trading and however much R&D you do, however many patents you obtain, you will eventually have to come to the UK to be handled by our IP traders. It is sheer genius. I really don’t know why I’m feeling uneasy. 7 March 2016, 11 am
I am having a rather pleasant morning in a coffee shop in Hammersmith. I have ensconced myself at a table in the window, in the sun, watching the world go by, and ordered myself a succession of frothy coffee drinks. Then I have waited for people to come and visit me. OK, perhaps I exaggerate. Two people have come to visit me. One is my eldest daughter, and she has come to visit me because I have offered to buy her breakfast. She still doesn’t know why I bothered becoming her mother but she can see the point of my becoming her lifelong benefactor, and it is this model we are working on when she hands me a mother’s day present. It is a beautiful middle-Eastern jar of mixed nuts in honey. It weighs a ton. I add it to the other ton-weighing things in my rucksack – for example my laptop and my Red Bull® supplies – and hope I can make it home to the Wess Curntry without slipping a disc. We exchange news and eat breakfast and then after my daughter has gone, I share a drink and a chat with the new Chair of the Media & PR Committee. He used to be a journalist. Now he is a patent attorney. Therefore he is better placed than anyone else in the Whole Wide World to do CIPA’s Media & PR work. He knows how journalists work and the best ways to con them into printing an article for you, and why it is that when they do print the article, they only print the bits that make you sound stupid. He has grand plans to have a pool of CIPA people who can write articles for journalists to misprint and be ready to say erudite things on national television the moment the call comes. He wants to organise media training for these people. I tell him I had media training once. I say it was great fun, and now I know I have to wear a jacket with a pocket otherwise the sound engineer will have to put his hand down my dress. He suspects I am remembering something else entirely. We discuss CIPA’s Official Position on Brexit, which Council has not quite agreed yet. We nearly agreed it at last week’s meeting, but now we must go through the document writing process outlined above so as to re-agree it in several different formats until the referendum has taken place and the document isn’t needed anyway. Or until ITMA or the IP Federation or someone publishes a better one and we can say: Yeah, CIPA’s position is a bit like that too. The new Chair explains that we are likely to get asked what our Official Position is whenever we make a comment on anything, even if it is nothing to do with Europe. I say don’t worry; I’m off to see the IPO next; I will ask them what’s going to happen about the UPC and things if there’s a Brexit, and then we can decide if we like it or not. 6 March 2016
Today we traditionally give some thought to what it is to be a mother. And why anyone bothers. Clearly my own four children have given the matter some thought and concluded that they don’t know why I bothered. And having thus found me wanting, got on with normal life again. This does actually make me sad. I wonder whether doing the right thing by CIPA has cost me too dear in terms of my family relationships. But then I remember that nobody at CIPA asked me to do the right thing by them; I just rolled up one day and started causing trouble. Nor was I exactly a domestic goddess before I got involved with CIPA, either – although I was a pretty good single parent for a while, this being the closest I ever got to ruthless dictatorship. Ah well. Time to drink gin again. |
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