The boat cruise years
Every spring, a circle of Munich attorneys hired a boat at the INTA meeting and quizzed the world's trade mark people over the water.
Struck by June Halloran · assayed by Petra Voss · · 5 min read
Some professions keep their memory in archives. The European trade mark world kept part of its memory on boats. For a run of years in the middle of the 2000s, a circle of Munich attorneys calling itself the CTM Advisory Initiative hired a harbour vessel during the annual meeting of the International Trademark Association, put a quiz sheet on the tables, and let the river or the lake do the talking. This journal keeps the entry because the cruises were not an eccentricity: they were the profession drawn to scale, a hundred and fifty guests, a skyline sliding past, and a card of questions about the Community Trade Mark.
The harbour keeps its own register of signs, and the bench keeps a guide to the markers for anyone who reads the water the way it reads a filing.
An association with a boat
The Initiative was a registered Munich association of patent and trade mark attorneys, founded to spread knowledge of the then young Community Trade Mark, the single filing that covered the whole European Union. Its members wrote articles, answered questions and kept a public register of useful decisions. But its best remembered instrument was hospitality: a boat cruise in whichever city hosted the INTA meeting that year. In Amsterdam in 2003 the boat worked the canals. In San Diego in 2005 it was the High Spirits, a charter vessel out on the harbour, with over 150 registered guests and the Marriott sliding by on the skyline. The pattern held: register early, board at dusk, answer questions about European marks until the skyline darkened.
San Diego, May 2005
The 2005 cruise is the best documented, because its hosts published the evening like a small gazette. Trademark experts, guests and friends from around the world came aboard; the members had set up a quiz on European trade mark and design issues; the winner of the Amsterdam quiz two years earlier, an Israeli practitioner named Ronit Barzik-Soffer, drew this year's winners. Peter Müller of the Initiative handed an award to Ingo Brückner of DaimlerChrysler. Names that any patent attorney of the era would recognise fill the captions: Baronikians, Beschorner, Kador, Wacker, Vorbuchner, Friese. It is the bar of a congress hotel, except that the floor moved. The harbour did the seating plan. A hundred and fifty guests cannot escape a conversation on a boat, and the quiz made sure the conversation stayed on marks.
Why a boat and not a ballroom
The choice was practical in a way only regulars would see. The INTA meeting gathered ten thousand people across five days, and every firm with a hospitality budget competed for the same restaurants and rooftop bars. A boat closed the guest list by itself: the gangway rose at a fixed hour, the harbour gave you a fixed duration, and nobody could drift to a better party because there was nowhere to drift to. A quiz on decks did what a panel in a ballroom never quite did, which is put a Basel in-house counsel next to a Cleveland litigator with a pencil and a shared need to finish the card. The Community Trade Mark itself was the excuse, but the cargo was acquaintance.
The quiz as calling card
The quiz deserves its own strike at the bench. European trade mark trivia, pronounced over a sound system to a multinational deck, is a very particular genre: part teaching, part brag, part icebreaker. The Initiative's questions ran to the Community Trade Mark regulation and the new Community Design, and the prizes were real. A question card survives in the published record: multiple choice, a little stern, unmistakably written by people who enjoyed correcting papers. A quiz makes the hosts useful in the gentlest way: not a pitch, not a brochure, just a deck of people discovering what they do not know about Alicante's register while the bay goes past. Professional associations have sold themselves with worse instruments.
Toronto and after
The next year's INTA meeting was in Toronto, and the Initiative's published pages from that era are full of slides and speakers: names from European firms answering questions about the CTM beside Lake Ontario. The site kept a page for each gathering, the way a ship keeps a log: Amsterdam, San Diego, Toronto. After 2008 the trail in the public archive thins, the way small associations' trails do when the members' day jobs swell. The Community Trade Mark itself sailed on; in 2016 it was renamed the European Union trade mark when the office became EUIPO, and the initials CTM passed into memory. The boats are what the web kept, and the web kept them generously.
What the cruises left behind
It is tempting to file all of this under eccentricity and move on. That would misread it. The cruises were the soft machinery of a hard profession: the way opposing counsel became counsel who had once shared a boat, the way a foreign associate learned the Munich firms by first name. The bench's position is that the paper of the trade mark world, the filings and the decisions, always rested on evenings like these. Associations come and go; the record of who came aboard does not. A reader who finds an old page of deck photos is not looking at a party. They are looking at the supply chain of trust, with a quiz card and a pencil laid on the table, and a whole profession learning that the mark it shared was also a reason to share an evening.
Somewhere in a Munich archive there may still be a quiz card with the evening's questions, and somewhere a lapel pin from the deck. The bench files them under the only heading that fits: the years when a young mark needed friends, and its friends chartered boats.
