16 November 2015
Uh-oh. I have been found out again. This time I have been found out for having a task force (da-da-da-OOPS) which is insufficiently Proper and Serious and too reliant on people just bumbling around hoping for the best. I must forthwith turn the task force (da-da-da-oh-do-I-have-to?) into a limited company or a registered charity or some such, with proper documents and proper people in charge, and a budget and a bank account and a board of directors and, oh, I don’t know, a water dispenser probably. Because otherwise, the world will fall in. I can imagine how this will go down with the rest of the task force, just when we'd got ourselves a name and a logo and we thought we were doing so well. The thing with IP Inclusive, as with many volunteer groups, is that it thrived on being insufficiently proper and serious. It was the Parent Teachers’ Association, the village drama group. It was we’re-all-in-this-together. It was make-do-and-mend. It was doing everything out of the goodness of your heart and on a shoestring, usually with a glass of wine in one hand and a slice of pizza in the other. There were no rules, no formalities. We did not have terms of reference or itemised deliverables. We did not budget, because we had no money. And things were not perfect, but they were good enough. We all knew roughly where we were going and we got some incredible stuff done. Amazingly, no one got hurt. But when you think how risky it was, working together like that from across the IP professions with nothing more tangible between us than trust and shared vision, well, all I can say is it is a good job someone at CIPA spotted the dangers before it was too late. Because now we can protect ourselves with layers of internal governance and authorisation procedures and audits, and never will we have to work with one another again without conducting a full risk assessment beforehand and a 360⁰ appraisal afterwards. Phew!
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12 November 2015, 4.30 pm
Actually, forget what I said about the cybercrime talk being the scariest one. The scariest one is me standing in for Mr Davies to give an update about CIPA’s activities. Mr Davies was also caught up in the train chaos and so I am a last-minute substitution. I am the ideal person for this because I am almost as good as Mr Davies at waffling for hours about things I can only vaguely remember happening. I tell the audience what I can see from the crow’s nest of The Good Ship CIPA. This is not always the same as what other people can see from the crow’s nest, although to be fair there are not many CIPA folk prepared to venture up there at all. I explain that I can see land ahoy and I tell people how we are planning ahead to make the most of the opportunities we find there. I say I can also see pirates ahoy and this is what CIPA is planning to do about them. I say there are The Rocks of Referendum and there is Das Gute Schiff Rumtopf, not to mention an IPReg patrol boat called The Happy Heap that is looking for incompetent patent attorneys who’ve drunk too much overproof rum. At the end of the talk I ask if anyone has any questions. It is five minutes to happy hour: of course no one has any questions. The audience has little understanding of, let alone interest in, what I have just been saying: they know there are not really pirates and that IPReg doesn’t actually have a patrol boat. However, a quick show of hands (at one minute to happy hour) reveals that they trust CIPA to get on with it and not bother them any further. I’ll bet they do. What a great way of gathering feedback! 12 November 2015, 7 pm In order to save CIPA money, I took the Park & Ride into Cardiff. Now, after happy hour, I must locate the right bus stop to get back to my car before it’s impounded for the night. It is not easy, working out where to catch a Park & Ride bus. I decide to ask the nice ticket desk people at Cardiff Queen Street station. They will know, because they work in Cardiff. But it turns out they do not know. In the course of a most bizarre conversation, I find that they have no idea what I mean by “Park & Ride”, much less that Cardiff has one. We only do trains here, they say. Yes, thank you, I got that. But I thought you might at least have heard of buses. Eventually I find the right bus stop, and some considerable time later the right bus. It is full of weary-looking Christmas shoppers. The South Wales Cyber Cluster has obviously put them off shopping online. 12 November 2015, 11 am
Today I am taking the train to Cardiff for a regional CPD seminar. Oh, no, turns out I am not taking the train after all. Trains from Bristol Parkway to Cardiff have been cancelled. Pretty much all trains from Bristol Parkway have been cancelled, in fact. There is a replacement bus service but not even the station staff seem convinced that this is a viable alternative. I get back in my car and drive to Cardiff. I do not have the satnav with me so I have to rely on instinct and this very nearly takes me to the nearest pub. Eventually I find myself trip-trapping over the Welsh troll bridge again, however, so I know I am on roughly the right track. Unlike the trains. 12 November 2015, 4 pm We are in the middle of the CPD seminar. We have had some fascinating talks. One of the speakers invested in a company which was suing Google® for US patent infringement. It still is, many years on. His talk was entitled “David vs Goliath”. When we asked him why he invested in a company that had taken on Google, he said because the technology was so exciting. Is that not touching? There is hope for the world yet. Now we are having a talk about IP litigation insurance, the products available and the small print that tends to go with them. Some of the small print says that you have to “co-insure”. This means that the insured has to pay x% of the litigation costs that the insurer would otherwise have had to pay. Apparently this is good because it shows that the insured party is serious about the litigation. Perhaps I am being naïve here, but it seems to me that what it actually shows is that you have accidentally obtained (100–x)% of the cover you thought you’d obtained. Why they cannot say that in the first place I have no idea. The scariest talk of the afternoon was about cybercrime and cyber security. Cybercrime is things like ransomware and denial of service and phishing and identity theft, and of course malware and spyware and generallyincrediblyevilware. Cyber security is what you do to stop cybercrime happening. There is actually no such thing as cyber security. Cybercrime is very easy. Apparently you can hire a bot for $50 a day to take out someone else’s website. Apparently you can go to a part of the internet called The Dark Market – which I’ve no doubt is run by Amazon® because what part of the internet retail space isn’t these days – and buy all manner of software with which to commit your cybercrimes. Apparently this software is cheap, and for obvious reasons – because its customers do not mess about with returns policies, they just send in a hit-man – the backup support and customer service levels are better than you’d get with the average Microsoft® product. Not that that is setting the bar particularly high. The Dark Market sounds like an ideal place, in fact, to do your Christmas shopping. 11 November 2015, 7 pm
In a fit of nostalgia, I am reading some of my 2014 diary entries. They make me realise that this time last year, I was having fun. I was only the VeePee and the VeePee is a carefree kind of role to have, positively insouciant in fact, compared to that of the Pee. Mr Davies and I were travelling round the country meeting CIPA members; it wasn’t exactly the height of luxury but everywhere we went we were offered smiles and biscuits, and when we cocked things up we laughed about it and apologised and tried something else instead. Now I have almost no time to visit members. When I cock things up people get very, very cross with me. I am not allowed to laugh because it is undignified and I am not allowed to apologise because it might be seen as an admission of CIPA’s liability. I am not allowed to make friends with people in case they are secretly plotting to overthrow Council. I have to get permission for the things I do instead of making them up as I go along. I do not say “yes” half as often as I used to, and when I talk to Mr Davies it is largely to whinge. I go to some quite posh occasions but invariably I find that a jammy dodger with a CIPA member in Ipswich generates a warmer kind of atmosphere than a plateau of petits puddingettes with a President. I realise, all of a sudden, that it is no fun at all being the CIPA Pee. This might be bearable if there were an element of power in the role, if I could tell people to stop being boring and pernickety and just do as I say. But there is no power. There is only the sense that if something goes wrong, you will be held responsible; that if something goes right, you will be asked why you didn’t get approval for it first; and that if you disagree with Council about the difference between the right things and the wrong things, you will be dismissed as naïve and misguided. If you stick up for the principles that you thought people elected you for, you will be branded a trouble-maker and micro-managed to the point of micronisation. Having written patents about particle size reduction, I know that micronisation is the point at which your particles either start flowing nicely wherever you send them, or become explosive. No prizes for guessing which type of particle I am. And so, about six months into my tenure, it occurs to me that we will all be glad when I’ve stopped being Pee. Because then I will be able to start laughing again, and tell other people to stop being boring and pernickety. And I will be able to publish my diary again, to make other people laugh. I am not cut out for this Being Professional lark. I am good at being bold and cutting through the crap. I am good at seeing the Big Picture and the Big Future and imagining things there that other people don’t want to see. I am good at saying yes: yes we’ll give it a whirl; yes let’s work together. I am also good at saying But let’s not worry about forms and procedures and reports and reviews, let’s just get on with it. I’m not always 100% right, but I usually move us further forward than if we hadn’t tried. I get things done. This of course is the antithesis of what Council wants from the CIPA President. And no matter how many members you have eaten biscuits with, you just try being anything other than the type of President that Council wants. Just try. I have called a meeting, at the start of next year, of the Chief Eggsek and me and the PeePees with the various numbers of Eyes (the EyePeePee, the EyeEyePeePee, the EyeEyeEyePeePee, etc). At this meeting we are going to discuss: Exactly what is the role of the CIPA Pee? And: How can we make it feasible for someone who is not either superhuman or retired? And: How can we make it more attractive, and I do not mean just changing the ribbon on the swimming gala medal? I suspect we are going to conclude thus: We have learned a lot from this year’s experience, and you see that wurzel over there with the Red Bull® can, well, that is exactly what we don’t want the CIPA Pee to be like, and so long as we can avoid that, we’re happy. 11 November 2015, 3 pm
I am very extremely busy. I am planning the namby-pamby (but very exciting) diversity launch event. I am planning another round-table meeting on diversity for the new year, to follow up on the first one we did and to remind ourselves that it was not such a bad idea after all, but that we did not completely finish diversity in 2015 so will still have to work on it in 2016. I am liaising with people about the 2016 CPD webinar and seminar programme, which needs to be a bit fuller than the 2015 one or CIPA will go bankrupt. I am liaising internationally with people on our International Liaison Committee, who are right now out in Japan and keep sending me emails with Japanese words in. And I am liaising with our Education & Professional Standards Committee and the EPO Academy, so that we can work together in the future on, well, anything to do with educating and professionally standardising European patent attorneys. These days I write a lot of emails that say, “Dear A and B, May I introduce you to one another so that you can go off and do stuff together that I would love to join in with but don’t have time for please keep me posted good luck thanks, Andrea.” 10 November 2015
I learn that at last week’s Council meeting (which I missed due to being unavailable for getting shouted at), Council voted not to change the Bye-laws so as to allow in the possibility – only the possibility, mind – of at some point in the future perhaps wanting to separate the requirements for being a CIPA Fellow from the requirements for being a registered patent attorney, the latter being something that the regulator controls and we don’t. I am gobsmacked. Normally Council’s reaction to anything regulation-related is automatic outrage. Now we have voted to align ourselves with the regulator for the foreseeable future. Apparently people thought that if we wanted to de-link fellowship and regulation at a later date, it would be easy enough just to pop back to the Privy Council (who let’s face it are used to people popping in) and ask to amend the Bye-laws again. Because amending the Bye-laws is easy-peasy and absolutely doesn’t involve months’ worth of committee meetings and membership consultations and Council debates and legal advice and exchanges with the said Privy Council. If I were the Leader of CIPA, I think, I would shout at Council to get a grip. I would tell it to stop sleep-walking its way into a future that looks exactly the same as the past. Because, I would say, it has been elected by CIPA members to look after them, and to look after the profession they represent, and to look after their future. If I were the Leader of CIPA, I would have to stamp my feet and refuse to endorse this move, or rather this failure to move, for being contrary to everything I stood for. But I am not the Leader of CIPA. I am only the Pee. The Pee is not a Leader. CIPA doesn’t like Leaders because Leaders are not democratic and they go around not getting permission for things. They go around talking about the future like it’s actually going to be different. My thought for the day: There is a fine line between visionary and delusional. Being visionary gets things done. Being delusional gets you locked up, or at the very least laughed at in Council meetings. You can see where I’m going with this. After a double gin and tonic, even I can see where I’m going with this. 9 November 2015
Today I must find sponsorship for some namby-pamby webinars about unconscious bias and diversity. The Internal Governance Committee does not want CIPA to foot the bill for these, for a whole shedful of reasons. To begin with, I am essentially untrustworthy, and though I have made the effort to ask for permission in this case, I have almost certainly not sought permission for several associated acts. Secondly, a number of CIPA projects have overspent their budgets this year. Whilst no one can prove this is my fault, it is highly likely that I am implicated in some way whenever financial imprudence is involved. Thirdly, CIPA has already done lots for the diversity task force, albeit in Mr Davies’s and my free time. Unconscious bias is in any event a figment of the imagination. There is no unconscious bias in the patent profession. If there were, we would know about it. So far I have got two offers of sponsorship. I think I may have to be more pushy to get the rest of the money I need. Clearly this goes against my nature, so I will have to dig deep. Er, hum. |
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