Posts Tagged: "Pooley interview"

With the Euro once again in crisis people look back on the decision to go with the common currency and many people here believe that that was a step too far. That engaging in the expectation that if we do this it will naturally bring us closer together was perhaps way too optimistic. And too risky. And that risking the kind of fiscal instability that we have seen recently in order to push everyone towards a closer political union some people are saying now was a very bad bet to make, without a real supra-national bank and without having first knitted the countries together better politically.

An interview with Jim Pooley, former Deputy Director General of WIPO – The actual changes that we might have to accept in a truly globalized, harmonized system are not going to be that difficult for us. The real difficulty is getting everybody to agree on one set of best practices. That, it turns out, is a political road that is just as difficult now as it ever has been. But the goal is clear, the goal is compelling and I think all of us need to work as hard as we can to push things in that direction. First of all we’ve got to get the industrialized countries to agree on a single approach, or at least an understood and aligned approach, to a grace period. Once that happens I think the other issues that we have to deal with will fall into place. We have to keep in mind that while the politicians or diplomats argue with one another, we have sitting on the sidelines all of our clients who are cheering for harmonization. They want to see this happen. And at the end of the day politicians need to recognize it’s the users of the patent system that own it and we need to make sure that they get the system that they deserve.