A couple of weeks ago our dear blogmeister Jeremy addressed the British Group of the Union of European Practitioners in Intellectual Property in the convivial setting of The Royal Overseas League on this topic. Harking back to a time before fax, email, and before any of our intellectual property laws in the UK existed in their present form, when neither OHIM nor the EPO existed and WIPO was but a babe, he reminisced thus:WHERE ARE WE v WHERE I THOUGHT WE’D BE My first taste of IP came in 1973, when I found myself researching for a PhD on ownership of IP rights. It was a wonderful time, a decade for consolidation of that sense of emancipation which came from living in the Swinging Sixties. What I’m going to do this evening is to say a bit about what IP looked like to a neophyte at the beginning of the 1970s, to give an idea of what we either hoped or expected would happen, and how right or, more usually, wrong I was. Looking at the big picture first ……
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