We need some approximately interesting IP stories!

8 October 2014

The Media & Public Relations Committee (aka the Shouty Things Committee) wants to hear from CIPA members who have interesting IP-related stories to tell.  Stories which would attract journalists and excite the national press, if not into a frenzy then at least into a state of approximate interest.

For the avoidance of doubt, the following are unlikely to excite the national press:

• Winning an argument with the EPO about an Article 54(3) citation.
• Discovering a fascinating new etymological fact.
• Outrage at the inappropriate use of a semi-colon.
• The IPO re-numbering one of its standard letters.
• The results of your office survey on paper clips.
• A client thinking he’s invented a perpetual motion machine when he hasn’t (unless of course he gets it onto Dragons’ Den).

What we need is stories of companies who have done excellently well thanks to their excellently good IP attorneys.  We need clients who are prepared to attest in public to the excellent goodness of their IP attorneys and their undying faith in the patent system.  We need tales of blockbuster patents and multiple-claim-drafting heroes and IP derring-do, of knights in clear, concise and shining armour slaying patent trolls and waving presumptions of validity from the parapets, who rescue damsels from the perils of further processing and preferably also the UK economy from decline.

Then we will publish these stories in the Financial Times and The Economist and Sad People's Weekly.

I am sure there must be hundreds of suitable tales languishing in CIPA members' files.  If you know of any, please contact our Chief Shouty Person Mr Lampert forthwith.