CIPA Congress, Lancaster London Hotel, London
Roya Ghafele, director of Oxfirst Ltd and fellow of the Said Business School at Oxford University, put the challenges facing patent offices especially well: “Patent offices, as key players in a working patent system, need to adapt to massive increases in demand and accept the changing nature of scientific expertise as a result of new technologies.”
In the context of her speech, on crowdsourcing prior art search on the Internet, this rings true, but the general sentiment has wider applications across the intellectual property industry.
Many of the presentations at the CIPA Congress relied, either implicitly or explicitly, on a sense of what is possible with new technologies and their attendant ways of thinking. Everything from anti-counterfeiting efforts to the Patent Prosecution Highway (PPH) live or die on the quality of the technology that is used to implement them, and more importantly, on the ability of the participants to best harness that technology.
Alison Brimelow CBE, chair of the Intellectual Property Institute at Queen Mary’s University and a former president of the European Patent Office, was particularly illuminating and frank on the strengths and flaws of PPH.
Alongside matters of international agreements and co-operation, there is still and will remain a place for something a little more solid, a little more close to home. In a fascinating presentation, HHJ Colin Birss QC, who heads up the Patents County Court, explained the recent success of that body and exhibited a pragmatic approach to case management and workload that was welcomed by delegates.
Other keynote speakers included Baroness Wilcox, the UK IP minister, and Olivér Várhelyi, of the European Commission’s DG Markt, who spoke about patent reform in the EU and the continuing efforts to get some kind of agreement between member states, even if it can’t include everybody.
Alongside this, further panels discussed the relationship between industry and IP professionals, how to navigate intellectual property issues when doing business deals, the changing landscape for small and medium sized enterprises, and the now- traditional analysis of the last year’s hot topics. This last took in US patent reform, key cases in the European courts, and the imminent revision of European Patent Office guidelines.
