 Separate committees dealing with topics such as trade marks, patents and copyright meet regularly to discuss any issues of interest.Any position that the committee feels needs to be raised is passed to the Council for approval.The Federation has a distinctive position among other representative bodies dealing with intellectual property, and was influential in resisting the extension of second-tier patent protection in Europe, in the removal of form-based competition law from the UK Patents Act, and generally in the preparations for the Unified Patent Court and the unitary patent (still awaiting sufficient ratification as of 22 March 2018).