Patently Rubbish on professional bodies and politics:
"The EU's involvement in the trade mark registration process has therefore been to devalue a registration and to place a new burden on trade mark owners, while raking in the cash (see my previous post). They could have helped businesses, for example by creating a central registry holding searchable details of all the marks in all the EU countries, allowing us to clear new trade marks easily, cheaply and quickly; that would have been a genuinely valuable resource (but would not have been as profitable for the EU). But instead, they just created another level of complexity for the system.
And I haven't even got onto the real minutiae of class fee structures and specification drafting - two more areas where the EU's influence has again made life more difficult for businesses.
Suffice to say that I shall be disagreeing with the assumption by my professional institutes that we should vote to stay in."
Having a couple of years ago registered an EU-wide trademark, for a trivial fee, and having had to defend it once (by politely asking an infringer (in North Africa, not even in the EU) to stop infringing, which they did without any escalation, let alone involvement of the courts), I'm not sure what the problem is. I'd have thought that leaving it for registrants to sort it out among themselves rather than having a bunch of faceless busybodies scrutinising the font and dimensions of your proposal is the liberal, small-government way to go, but what do I know?
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