6 December 2017, 2.30 pm
For today’s Council meeting, I take a risk and wear my Christmas jumper. There was a time when this would have provoked outrage from my sober-suited colleagues, but it is a measure of how quickly a Past President can disappear into obscurity that today, nobody even notices. These days they have enough on their hands with the VeePee’s pink-and-purple fetish. The new IPReg Chief Eggsek is here as our Special Guest. This is not a privilege. Not even when certain Council members put on their best festive clothing for the occasion. She looks uncomfortable. We do not help by making her wait outside until we are ready to call her in – because you cannot have outsiders listening in on sensitive Council business such as Apologies for Absence. Our Special Guest has brought a presentation with her. Ms Russell, who was last year given the role of Mr Davies’s PA (this is also not a privilege) has loaded the presentation onto the CIPA IT system so that it displays nicely on the screen at the head of the table. We ignore it. Instead we fire random questions at our guest, to try to catch her out. It is excellent sport and results in a far more festive atmosphere than my jumper was able to engender. Every now and then she wearily moves on to the next slide, but not with any expectation of talking about it because we are already poised with our next set of questions. Many of these questions are what might loosely be termed “rhetorical”. They begin, for example, “Yes, but what you have to understand about our profession is…” After half an hour or so, our guest understands quite a lot more about our profession than when she first arrived. But it is not necessarily the things we thought she should understand. Following the departure of our Special Victim I mean Guest, we turn our attention to a most important decision. We must approve the renaming of the IP Exploitation Committee. There has been a feeling (sorry, no, a rational belief) that the term “exploitation” has negative connotations. It might imply that we are cynically manipulating our IP in order to make other people’s lives hell. And as everybody knows, there is nothing at all cynical or manipulative about an IP strategy. No sir, IP is All About Altruism. The identification of an alternative name apparently caused the Exploitation Committee a great deal of anguish. This I can believe. But at last it has decided to become the IP Commercialisation Committee, or Comm Comm for short, and Council is happy to approve this alliterative alternative once it has had a good long look at all the supporting evidence, in particular the Wikipedia® definition of “commercialisation”. This is all the fault of the Meeja and PeeArr Committee, which is very sensitive about sending out the wrong messages, particularly after Yours Truly was the President and sent out the wrong messages pretty much everywhere she went. The Meeja and PeeArr Committee has itself been renamed once – when CIPA suddenly twigged that there were other types of Meeja, not just the Press – so it has scant sympathy with other committees going through the process. I remember when the Regulatory Responses Committee became the Regulatory Affairs Committee and everyone thought it would thenceforth be much more exciting and derring-do. In fact nothing changed at all, and I suspect the same will happen with the Comm Comm.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
Archives
July 2019
Categories |