The conditions in which IP is generated, exploited, administered, managed, and litigated today would be unrecognizable to the practitioner at the end of the Second World War; the main factor that has brought this about is the effect of two powerful explosions—the growing volume of information available to him and the increased avenues through which that information was able to reach him. Business and professional communications were conducted almost entirely through the media of the letter delivered through terrestrial mail services, supplemented by telegram, and later telex where appropriate. Where a written message was to be duplicated, it might be done through the use of carbon paper; circulation to a larger readership might be achieved through the medium of a stencil or similar apparatus. The telephone was available for more immediate and also more informal conversations. Both mail and phone were office-to-office formats, meaning that an individual who was not at his work desk was effectively offmessage; at weekends and while on annual leave, an individual may as well have been on another planet. A busy legal practitioner might typically be expected to deal with 15 or 20 incoming written communications; his secretary would serve as a filter through which incoming phone calls passed and from which he could choose to be shielded. Fast-forward to the 21st century and this genteel state of affairs has vanished. IP practitioners and their clients are equipped with a range of mobile phones, keyboard-equipped smartphones, personal organizers, and other devices that ensure they are almost never offmessage. The modern digital technologies, largely eliminating intermediate devices such as the fax, enable a single piece of information to be delivered instantly, perfectly, and at virtually no cost to an unlimited number of recipients. It is not unusual for an IP practitioner or manager to receive incoming messages by the hundred on a daily basis. The information with practitioners must deal has vastly expanded too. Official records, the texts of legal judgments, the texts of statutes, treaties, implementing regulations, granting authorities’ office practices, requests for comments, and policy documents have never been more plentiful. Add to this the promotional and advertising materials relating to online and paper publications, newsletters from firms in private practice, representational bodies and lobby groups, not to mention conferences, seminars, and training courses, and it becomes swiftly apparent that the processing of incoming information has itself become a major feature in the modern IP expert’s portfolio of skills. There is a cost issue to address. Back in the 1950s, almost all available information had to be paid for. This is no longer the case. In the leading economies all treaties, statutes, and other primary legal documents are now freely available and instantly accessible online. First desktop publication, then weblogs, have made it easier for small niche markets to acquire and then share information. The classic law publishers’ business model is under huge strain, particularly where the main competition faced by publishers is no longer the excellence of each others’ products but the availability of free materials, commoditized by the information explosion. A second cost issue relates to the cost of reading and using information once it has been acquired. Time spent reading is time which it is difficult to persuade a client to pay for, which means that there is increasing preference on the part of some IP practitioners these days to be ‘drip-fed’ legal information as and when they require it rather than to buy in and then read through learned tomes on their legal specialisms. Although IP is a large and vibrant area of legal practice and commercial activity, it is actually a loose confederation of relatively diverse niches (patents, copyrights, trade marks, etc), each being a micro-environment with its own informational and publishing ecology. This being so, even small shifts in the purchasing habits and information-processing roles of IP experts can have a major effect on the continuing availability of particularly commercial-based titles. It will be fascinating to see how those who create and deliver information to the IP community will respond and seek to adapt to the challenges ahead of them.
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Apr 30, 2012
N.C.V.N. Pereira + 2
Open Access
