Recovering

[kevin_standlee]

I enjoy our travels, but they are wearing at times. Complicating things today was having to be up well before 5 AM in order to deal with a conference call with the UK. The call was useful, but left me behind the eight ball all day long, it seems. With luck I'll get some recovery time tonight. But I have to be back on the road again Sunday for a two-week stint in the Bay Area.

Comments

[history-monk.livejournal.com]

And I thought my employers tried to ignore time zones ... I'm in the UK, and we have to talk to the West Coast a lot, but we never schedule calls before 08:00 their local time.

[kevin-standlee.livejournal.com]

Well, that's the problem. It wasn't work-related. WSFS (through the Mark Protection Committee) is working on registering the more-important service marks like HUGO AWARD and WORLDCON in the EU, and the legal firm handling it is in the UK. (Yes, I know, I know, Brexit, bla, bla, bla, but as of right now the UK is still a part of the UK.) For various reasons, we needed to talk with them, and that meant including all of the US-based members of the MPC who wanted to ask questions, and it had to be over before any of us went to work, and had to be during the UK work day. 0500 PDT / 0800 EDT / 1300 BST was the latest we could hold the call that satisfied all of those constraints, and then only because I'm working from home this week and could immediately start work at 0600 PDT when the call ended.

[history-monk.livejournal.com]

Ah, makes sense - and since all the recent European Worldcons have been in the UK, it makes perfectly good sense to have a UK firm do the work.

[kevin-standlee.livejournal.com]

Well, the next two European Worldcons will probably not be in the UK, but the EU is still a single market. WSFS MPC policy is to prioritize mark registrations based on how many Worldcons a given country (the EU counts as a single country, and the UK is still part of it) has hosted. The USA is at the head of that list, but the EU (including UK) is second, and thanks to the very generous donation from Spokane and other Worldcons and individuals, we finally have enough money to start the process. (It's pretty expensive, particularly if anyone objects, and there are publications, companies, etc. that have the word "Hugo" in their names that we have to negotiate with through the lawyers.)

The legal firm with which we are dealing is the same one that we (actually Loncon 3, with the WSFS MPC as a fellow-traveler) engaged to deal with a serious threat against the Hugo Awards that involved a firm demanding that we cease giving out the Best Fancast Award because they claim exclusive rights to the term "Fancast." Up until the ceremony itself, we still didn't know if they were going to try and serve a restraining order on us, but in fact nothing came of it other than burning thousands of pounds in legal fees. In any event, that firm knows who we are, has a fan within the firm (but we still have to pay, nor are we asking for special favors), and is well versed in intellectual property law.

Incidentally, the priority order after the EU is Canada and then Australia. Inasmuch as our policy is to only attempt registration in countries that have hosted more than one Worldcon, Japan isn't prioritized, nor will New Zealand be should they win their 2020 bid.