Intellectual Property

Guy probably needs a new landlord, and helps interns to navigate intellectual property.

Transcript

Welcome to the one-hundred-and-seventeenth episode of The Undercover Intern podcast, coming to you live from the centre of London Luton Airport. I'm your host, Guy Snapdragon, and today is Monday the 28th of April 2025.

We are sponsored this week by The Maywentery Golf Course. Welcoming men of all abilities since 1923. A polite reminder to members that the club’s remaining caddies will not murder you and that members are strictly prohibited from using donkeys, mules, zebras or tiny horses as makeshift buggies.

I begin this week with a quotation from Christopher Hitchens: Open. The true essence of a dictatorship is in fact not its regularity but its unpredictability and caprice. Those who live under it must never be able to relax, must never be quite sure if they have followed the rules correctly or not. End. Even I don’t know what caprice means, I thought it was a fruit, but that doesn’t make sense, why would a dictatorship be defined by a fruit? Actually, the president in Guatemala during the 1950s was overthrown because of bananas, wasn’t he? Or was it because of the United States’ paranoia about communism? It was either that or bananas.

Anyway I was reminded of this quotation over the weekend because on Saturday my landlord told me that he was reducing my rent by 95% because he, quote, loves me and wants me live by his protective shadow. He sent over 36 Curly Wurlys because he knows I love nothing better of a Saturday night than a good chocolatey caramel chomping session and a Quentin Tarantino movie or three. All good, right? He’s an odd sort but capable of these unexpected and kind gestures. For the first night in weeks I slept all the way through, feeling like my miserable 2025 had turned a corner. Then yesterday a gaggle of semi-skilled manual workers knocked on my door saying that they were here to fix the windows. Fine, a warning would have been nice but go ahead. So I let them in, made them a big pot of tea, hid my valuables and left them to it. I actually joined one of those historic walking tours around London. Why the fuck not? 

Anyway, I got back around 7pm, full of hope, Wagamamas’ Chicken Katsu Curry and facts about Jack The Ripper to find that the windows to my flat had all been removed and replaced by mirrors. From the outside it looks like bricks, you can’t see in or anything, so I suppose I have more privacy. But inside it’s a reflective nightmare. A literal house of mirrors. What’s more, shards of what I presume must be window glass have been glued to the ceiling throughout the flat. This has to be a threat? The landlord left a birthday card saying, quote, the deepest responsibility of a medical practitioner is not curative, it’s pastoral: I will walk with you into whatever darkness may come. End this rather unorthodox birthday card quote. He said that he’d listened to last week’s podcast and decided to remove the windows because he thinks I’m a suicide risk. First of all, I appreciate your listenership and please vote for me to win The Interns’ Choice Award. Secondly, my birthday isn’t until June. Thirdly, we’re on the ground floor so if I jump out of a window the worst I’m at risk of is a grazed knee. Fourthly, why the ceiling shards? I admit that gravity makes it difficult to do myself any damage, but still. Fifthly, did the semi-skilled manual workers really have to leave the long rope and the small crooked stool behind?

The worst part is the heat. What with already having the permanent maximum central heating and the aga next to my bed. The mirrors amplify the heat, albedo, and the only breeze I can get now is through the letterbox, which I’ve sellotaped open. What it’s going to be like come July I dread to think…

So anyway, another difficult weekend for me. It seems to be the pattern. I feel tired, what with the childhood-onset BST-related insomnia too. One thing the mirrors have shown me is that my body looks tired too. It’s almost impossible to avoid my reflection and wearing clothes in the flat is completely out of the question, but I’m stomach saggy and my face looks like one of those slinky toys, full of chins and cascading circles. I’ve lost any hint of my youthful angularity.

I met someone on the walking tour, Irene something or other, I think. It’s early hours but I’m in love with her. 

Today’s episode is about World Intellectual Property Day, celebrated by Christians every April 26 as it marks the day that Jesus started writing his autobiography, famously never to be published but later stolen and rewritten by others who profited from it. I’m always hesitant to perpetuate the cultural dominance of Christianity, and do not want to exclude listeners of other faiths or other non-faiths. Your votes mean as much to me as any Christian’s. But intellectual property is important for interns of all faiths and non-faiths.

Intellectual property is essential to realise an idea like the perpetual alarm clock. One must be mindful of the limitations of the world in which you live. Transient alarms disappoint me and so I invented a perpetual one. Are you frustrated by your muesli options? Well, perfect the recipe and make your own with fewer raisins. Are you reluctant to fly with an airline that murders its customers? Well, you shouldn’t be flying anyway because it’s bad for the environment. Take the train. Are you unable to put an image into MS Word without it totally [swear] up every single part of the document and forcing you to miss another deadline? Invent new word processing software. This world isn’t going to just hand you a patent. You have to be good enough and dedicated enough to earn one, like I am. And, by the way, it’s pronounced 'patent' rather than 'patent'.

I have sold the intellectual property rights for my podcast voice to OpenAI. They’re paying me for podcast content too, but I think they’ve paid largely for the way that I sound. You’ll have noticed that my voice now has the masculine sensuality of a good Cuban cigar, and that you somehow trust everything I say. You should trust me and I’m not embarrassed to tell you that I have had help from Nicholas Lyndhurst to bring me to this point, and that I am in high demand for TV adverts, audiobooks and corporate podcasts. I desperately need to make some money and so have sold everything to them. I’m not going to pretend to you that it was a difficult decision to sell, or that I’m worried that AI is going to take over and render future intern podcasters obsolete. Frankly, they paid me enough money that I don’t have to worry about such things, and I deserve this after the past few months of pain.

Many of you will think that Intellectual Property is all about patents. But you might be surprised to learn that ‘May you use your time wisely, and may your use of wise be timely’ is a trademark. You won’t see it anywhere else, and that’s what a trademark protects you from; a trademark is a patent for podcasts. A copyright is another type of intellectual property and is used for things that are too long to be patents, like books and World War Two documentary films on Netflix. Jesus The First would have been well advised to get a copyright to stop Judas and all the others from stealing his autobiography. 

So those are the three intellectual properties: patents, trademarks and copyrights. 

I did hope that Michael Webb, Chief Legal Officer for The Undercover Intern podcast, would join me today to talk about internship options for getting into patent, trademark or copyright law, but he’s surprisingly shy for a lawyer, and horribly underperforms when he’s in a well-attended court. Suffice it to say that a career in law isn’t just about catching allotment killers and dramatic courtroom showdowns on TV, though. It is about hard graft, attention to detail and a firm grounding in podcast rules and regulations.

So there you have it - intellectual property is like any other sort of property but instead of bricks it is brain. Instead of roof, it is skull. Instead of garden … etc etc.  

Before we go, my producer has just whispered that caprice is an adjective that means having a lot of space or room to contain things, or an impressively large capacity. So yes, that makes sense; a dictatorship is big. Hitchens always liked to use long words that nobody understood, the devilishly clever dead show-off.

I’ve been your host, Guy Snapdragon. My producer is Lee Buckingham. Michael Webb is Chief Legal Officer and Legal support comes from Paul Tout, Simon Warwick, Murray Mackay and Matthew Rook. Accountancy from Graham Cree. Security from David Jarrett. May you use your time wisely, and may your use of wise be timely.