Welcome to the first ExCo News reporting on the Executive Committee meeting held in Rome in November. In this issue, you will find reports from the President of FICPI, Peter Huntsman, and from the President of the CET, Eric Le Forestier, dealing with the activities of FICPI since the ExCo meeting in Cape Town and up to the present time. Mark Wilson, Acting Deputy Secretary General and Assistant Reporter General of the CET, reports on the resolutions passed at the ExCo, which deal with issues affecting many FICPI members on a daily basis, and which demonstrate FICPI's continuing representation of the independent IP profession throughout the world. In subsequent issues there will be reports of specific papers considered and adopted by the CET.

Although it is early in the New Year, it is not too soon to start planning for the Congress in Melbourne - April will be here sooner than you think.

The eight months between the successful Cape Town Executive Committee meeting and the Rome ExCo were as busy as ever, and I must start this report by once again thanking the Bureau members as well as the other attendees of our monthly Bureau meetings, including the Secretariat.  Of course, that in no way suggests that we do all of the work for the Federation and those thanks are extended to every one of you who have given time to making FICPI the successful organisation it is.

Much of that work at the international level has been in preparing for the Rome ExCo, the Forum that followed it, the Asian Symposium in Korea in early December and, of course, the Melbourne Congress in April 2012.

In addition to this and our day to day work for FICPI, many of us spent some weeks of the time following Cape Town travelling for FICPI, with visits to authorities and other organisations for me in May and June, September, October and November. There are specific reports of all of these meetings, as well as published material on some of them, that will appear in the next FICPI News, so I will just give you an overview here.

In May we visited the USPTO, with a delegation covering patent, trade mark and design issues. This of course was before the America Invents Act was passed and much of the patent discussion focused on the Bill for that and the input, including from FICPI, that will be required to bring that to a successful conclusion – that input now being directed to the accompanying regulations.

The next formal attendance on this month of travel for our Vice President Bastiaan Koster and me was at the FICPI ABC meeting in Bath, England in mid-June, but on the way there we had a pleasant interlude in the Caribbean. As reported previously in the FICPI News, our Secretary General Julian Crump, Coleen Morrison, our chair of CET Group 1 Trade Marks, and Bastiaan and I had agreed to enter as a crew under the FICPI banner in the annual sailing regatta, the Patent Cup. This of course was done entirely privately, at no cost to the Federation, and you might think I should not be mentioning it in this report. However, I believe it goes to the heart of the origins and success of our organisation, the co-fraternity of IP specialists, and we were able to quietly sell the FICPI message to the other crews from Australia and New Zealand, the United Kingdom, the USA, Europe (including the EPO), Canada and Brazil. What was the outcome of the regatta? Well, we did not do very well but we were known as the crew that laughed the most – and we hope to repeat our involvement next year.

The FICPI ABC meeting is the annual combined meeting of the US, British and Canadian groups of FICPI, but open to others, with high level business sessions and social activities over three days. This gathering also epitomises FICPI to me, with its co-fraternity and education at the multinational level.

I left the ABC meeting early, missing the Gala Dinner at the Roman Baths, to speak at a meeting of the Danish Patent Attorneys Association and FICPI Denmark on privilege, in Copenhagen. My topic was on FICPI’s activities in relation to privilege, and I was joined by Lennart Karlström from FICPI Sweden who spoke about the Swedish success in having client-attorney privilege introduced there some ten years ago.

From my 24 hours in Copenhagen I flew to Oslo for the FICPI CET planning meeting over the weekend of 18/19 June and from there travelled to Shanghai for the successful Symposium there put on by FICPI China and the ACPAA, the All China Patent Attorneys Association.

Continuing the travel theme, in September I was back in Europe with a delegation maintaining our connections with the various IP European Commission directorates and, for the first time, the World Customs Organisation in Brussels and then the EPO in Munich. These delegation meetings were continued in Europe during the first week of November with visits to the WTO and WIPO in Geneva and OHIM in Alicante. We are welcomed at these meetings, and those at the other IP Offices we visit, by the highest level people from the respective authorities, and it is important that our delegations are also at the highest level and well prepared, in order that FICPI continues to be treated as relevant in the IP landscape.

In between these September and November delegation meetings I attended AIPPI’s ExCo and Forum in Hyderabad, India in October as their guest. One of the issues to come out of an IP NGO discussion there was the crowded meeting landscape, especially in the Northern Autumn. I can confirm that we are conscious of this and do try to plan the meetings well ahead to avoid conflicts with other organisations.

We also had delegations in Asia at the end of November with visits centred on the FICPI Korea Symposium to the JPO and Japanese Patent Attorneys Association in Tokyo, KIPO in Seoul and SIPO in Beijing. In Tokyo repeated the successful formula from last year of giving a seminar to JPAA members, this time focused on US and European patent issues. A more detailed report on that seminar will follow in the FICPI News.

Holding the FICPI Korea Symposium so close to the Forum here in Rome certainly put some pressure on those involved in organising it, and I congratulate and thank those concerned. The attendance numbers were very respectable.

Of course, I am not the only one travelling to various meetings and you will see reports of many others in subsequent reports. However, you will not see specific reports of all of them. These are the meetings that are put on by our national groups for their members, such as the ABC meeting and the Danish association meeting that I mentioned earlier. Others that I am aware of have been put on by the Swedish and Australian groups, but you will find more amongst the Country Reports presented to the ExCo and available on the FICPI website www.ficpi.org. I consider these meetings amongst the most important that are held by FICPI, for the purposes of selling the FICPI message to our members and others of being the voice of the private-practice IP profession. I know the Italian and Swiss groups are also planning meetings of this sort - I encourage all groups to arrange similar meetings, and to contact the Bureau or the CET to provide speakers if desired.

On the day to day issues, there are many others, such as TEC and the SEAD and EuroSEAD courses and the membership questionnaire, on which you will find reports amongst the ExCo papers.

The Melbourne Congress

So finally to the Congress. Planning for this is well in hand and the programme and brochure have now been circulated to our members. The venues and social arrangements are in place, and the speakers for the business sessions are now being finalised. The Congress will start with a General Assembly for members in the afternoon of Tuesday 17 April where the Bureau and the Commissions will report on their activities.

Then we will turn to the business sessions, with the overall theme of Communication and Cooperation. In the morning of Wednesday 18 April there will be two plenary sessions on Judges Without Borders (how the courts use decisions from other countries) and IP Offices Working Together and With Users for a Better IP World. It is intended for the latter session to be an interactive panel discussion.

There will then be two streams of 3 sessions in the afternoon of Wednesday 18 April and the first morning session on Thursday 19 April. In the first stream these will be Commercially Realistic Tech Transfer (extracting IP from research); A Single Patent in Europe (at last?); and Navigating Increasingly Crowded IP Waters. In the second stream the sessions will be Smoking Gun – The Case for Plain Packaging; Using Your Assets – IP Portfolio Review and Strategy; and Fighting the Hydra – IP in the Cloud.

The second session on Thursday 19 April will be a third and wrap-up plenary session Harmonised IP – Where to the Profession? As usual, the final session, in the afternoon of Thursday 19 April, will be for resolutions that come out of the business sessions.

There are a couple of final points I would like to make on the Congress. Firstly, a reminder that it will be open to eligible non-members – that is, IP attorneys in private practice who are not members – as well as to Australian patent and/or trade mark attorneys and trainees who are in private practice but are not yet eligible for membership.

Secondly, bearing in mind the ExCo in Melbourne will start on Sunday 15 April and will finish during the day on Saturday 21 April, the Bureau has agreed that private functions held in the evening of Saturday 14 April or earlier and in the evening of Saturday 21 April or later will not be objectionable under Rule 11 of the Lugano Code of Conduct.

Best wishes for 2012, and I look forward to seeing you in Melbourne.

Peter Huntsman, President.

CET Meetings and group meetings

Right after the ExCo in Cape Town, the usual wrap-up plenary CET meeting was held. A standalone CET meeting took place in Oslo, Norway, on June 18 and 19, 2011. I wish to warmly thank here Arild and Marit Tofting as well as Jon Heggstad for the excellent organization of this meeting and the social events.

In addition to the usual review of group activities, this meeting had three main objectives:

• the ICANN meeting in San Francisco (Petter Rindforth),
• a EPO Hearing in the Hague on potential “reform of the European patent grant process as a result of the IT Study commissioned by the European Patent Office“ (Leo Jessen and Eric Le Forestier),
• an OHIM Users Group meeting in Alicante (Andrew Parkes and Francesco Paolo Vatti),
• a meeting with SEPAF in Gothenburg (Danny Huntington and Eric Le Forestier),
• a WIPO SCP meeting in Geneva (Jan Modin),
• NGO coordination meeting in San Francisco during INTA (Eric Le Forestier),
• a SACEPO Working Party on Rules meeting in Munich (Daniel Alge),
• a public hearing on the revision of the Trade Mark system in Europe (James Fish),
• a meeting with the USPTO in Washington (Bureau members + Coleen Morrison, Rob Katz, Ray Stewart and Eric Le Forestier),
• a PCT Working Group meeting in Geneva (Jan Modin),
• official visits to various DGs of the EU Commission as well as to Commissioner Barnier’s cabinet (Bureau members + Coleen Morrison, Daniel Alge, Lennart Karlstrom and Eric Le Forestier),
• a visit to the EPO (Bureau members + Daniel Alge, Lennart Karlstrom and Eric Le Forestier),
• the WIPO Global Symposium of IP Authorities in Geneva (Jan Modin),
• the WIPO General Assemblies (Eric Le Forestier),
• the Oslo Conference on Innovation in the Future (Robert Watson),
• a WIPO SCT meeting (Andrew Parkes and Coleen Morrison),
• meetings with the WIPO and WTO (Bureau members + Ivan Ahlert, Jan Modin, Coleen Morrison & Eric Le Forestier)
• and finally, a visit to OHIM (Bureau members + Elia Sugrañes, James Fish and Robert Watson) just before the Rome ExCo.

• FICPI's comments on "The gTLD Applicant Guidebook” (Petter Rindforth);
• FICPI's comments on ICANN "Preliminary Issue Report on the Current State of the Uniform Dispute Resolution Policy" (Petter Rindforth);
• FICPI’s comments on the “Max Planck Institute Report for the EU Trade Mark Study” (Andrew Parkes);  
• Report on the Hearing with User Associations concerning the Revision of the Community Trade Mark Regulations and the Trade Mark Directive (James Fish);
• Report on the OHIM Cooperation Fund Working Group on Image Searching (Elia Sugrañes);
• FICPI's response to WIPO circular PCT 1295 on Quality of Search and Examination (Jan Modin);
• FICPI's response to WIPO circular PCT 1288 on Third Party Observations system (Jan Modin);
• FICPI's submissions on Quality of Patents and Privilege, to the 16th session of the WIPO SCP (Jan Modin & Leo Jessen);
• Proposed Changes in Australian Patent Law (Greg Chambers);
• FICPI submission to the WIPO SCP on cross-border aspects of “Confidentiality of Communications between Clients and their Patent Advisors” (Eric Le Forestier).

CET Operations

a) CET papers processing

Registration for the World Congress to be held at the Crown Towers Resort, Melbourne, Australia from 17-20 April 2012 is available on-line at
 

www.ficpi2012.org,

where you can also download and print the Congress brochure, and registration and hotel booking forms.

As previously announced, highlights of the working programme include:

• Judges Without Borders – How Judges Use Decisions From Other Countries
   
• Smoking Gun, Or Gunning For The Smoke? – The Case For Plain Packaging
   
• How Do You Play The Game When The Rules Keep Changing? IP Assets Review and Strategy
   
• “One day, my child, this will all be yours!” – Centralised IP : Where Is The Profession Going?

The Congress includes a high quality social programme that will show you the best of Melbourne while allowing you to meet with friends and colleagues from around the world.