Among the EU institutions, the EUIPO - short for European Union Intellectual Property Office - is probably one of the less visible ones. Originally founded as the Office for the Harmonization of the Internal Market (OHIM), its main function is to issue EU trade marks, but its remit is slowly expanding and increasingly covers activities related to copyright. This is how I found myself spending the last two days at the sprawling EUIPO campus overlooking the Mediterranean Sea just outside Alicante, which is one of the strangest places that I have come across in my life.

To understand the place, one needs to understand that issuing EU trademarks is a very lucrative business, which makes the EUIPO a very well-funded institution. Over the years, this wealth has found an expression in the form of an infrastructural cocoon that encapsulates a word class conference facility with some of the best views of any such place I have ever been to. There is a giant balcony with an undisturbed view across the Mediterranean - overlooking the budget hotels that house the continent’s traveling trademark lawyers coming to plead their clients’ cases in front of the Boards of Appeal.

Then there is the imposing perimeter fence, topped by arrays of CCTV cameras that would not feel out of place surrounding an embassy compound in a failed state - complete with armed security guards. And finally, there is the manicured on-campus forest, equipped with permanently installed water cannons at the ready to respond to the ever-present danger of careless conference-goers overlooking the numerous no-smoking signs neatly arranged between the pine trees.

Something about this carefully insulated atmosphere - both lavish and hermetically sealed - invites a different register of thinking. Spending two days in this place, as part of the temporarily displaced Brussels copyright policy bubble, made my mind wander back to ideas about non-places, temporary autonomous zones, and post-structuralist French philosophy. Who would have thought that these ideas could coexist with a conference experience that, in its peculiarly engineered way, ended up being genuinely enjoyable?