Wednesday whimsies

This case is all about
seats for airplanes

If you are a patent-y person, you may have been following the fiercely contested litigation in Virgin Atlantic Airways Limited v v Premium Aircraft Interiors (UK) Limited (noted here by Matt the Kat).  One of the more important aspects of this case is that it has again raised the question whether a successful claimant in patent infringement proceedings can secure damages when the patent is subsequently held to be invalid (see earlier PatLit posts here and here). It has been happily drawn to this Kat's attention by one of his truly observant friends that the Supreme Court has granted leave to appeal. If you are wondering what happened, there has been what we experts call a "changed circumstance" -- the decision of the EPO Technical Board of Appeal to amend Virgin's infringed patent almost beyond recognition. This was not foreseen by the Supreme Court when it considered the position in the first half of last year.

Golden Eggs for the
Golden Gate ...

Breakfast with Alfred and at least 134 other trade mark enthusiasts is the delightful prospect facing anyone attending the Madrid Protocol Breakfast Meeting at San Francisco's Golden Gate University on Tuesday 17 May, during this year's International Trademark Association Meeting.  The Alfred in question is Strahlberg and he has toiled tirelessly to set up an effective ginger group to help WIPO identify and deal with glitches in the soon-to-be-perfect Madrid System for international trade mark filing.  The meeting has its own LinkedIn group here and it's not too late to register your intent to attend. It's a great way to socialise over an unusually early breakfast after the previous night's networking.


New logo.  The 1709 Blog, which likes to bring you news and views concerning copyright in all its glory, has just had a new face-lift just a new template, really) in order to inaugurate its new logo.  It's not supposed to represent a copyright-shaped cake with a chunk cut out of it, but rather an old-fashioned clock face, without numbers, but with the hour and minute hands pointing respectively to the '5' (in the 24 hour clock system "17") and just ahead of the '2' (representing one sixth of the twelve five-minute intervals into which minutes are divided, or "09", which is just before "10"), giving you ... 1709.

Around the blogs.  In what looks as though it might just be the last shot before the Easter break, PatLit's PCC Page series on the workings of the Patents County Court (PCC) for England and Wales ponders the prospect of a PCC litigant striking out a somewhat mischievous counter action brought against him in the more expensive Patents Court by his PCC defendant.  IP Finance carries a bit of news which most people have missed -- the establishment in Taiwan of a bank to support Taiwanese businesses which find themselves at the receiving end of a writ for patent infringement (here).  The Class 99 weblog has spotted an appeal to the Court of Justice of the European Union in one of the most curious spats between a design and a trade mark we've seen to date (here, over the artwork displayed on the left).  And if you never knew what a MetroCartist was, Art & Artifice will surely tell you here.

Not the courts -- Manchester's
railway station

Talking of the PCC, tytoc collie has learned that the popular, dashing judge, Colin Birss QC, has intimated to an audience at a recent Appleyard Lees seminar in Manchester, that he was happy to bring the PCC to Manchester [could it be the comfortable seats on the Virgin trains, mewses Merpel?] and could "see good reasons for doing so" [ie lots of infringements to deal with?].  tytoc collie thinks it makes a terrific amount of sense for smaller, lower-value intellectual property actions to be heard in Manchester rather than drag the parties and their professional advisers down to London, especially since it's generally cheaper to fly to the Continent from anywhere in England than to take the train to London.

Wednesday whimsies

IMPORTANT NOTICE FOR THOSE FOLK WHO LIKE GETTING A SWIFT RESPONSE TO THEIR EMAILS: IPKat team member Jeremy is on his travels and won't have much access to his current and backlogged emails till Friday morning. If you are owed an email, please hang on in there -- you'll get a reply eventually.

WIPO is now broadcasting its own weather forecasts:
note the unusual concentric circles in the cloud formations

tytoc collie is delighted to discover that the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) has  taken   its next brave step into the world of social media by launching its new World IP Day Facebook page.  Says a source close to recent IPKat recruit Francis Purry, "We are encouraging IP Offices and the many other organisations which hold special events for World IP Day each year to post their activities on the Facebook page".  Merpel wonders what form this encouragement will take, and whether it will be efficacious.  In an apparently unrelated move, WIPO has also livened up the dull, mundane user-generated content of YouTube with some content of its own. 


Lingering with WIPO for a few more precious moments, the Kat can report that its Arbitration and Mediation Center is conducting an International Survey on Dispute Resolution in Technology Transactions.  According to the Center's Director Erik Wilbers, "the questionnaire has been developed with the support of the International Association for the Protection of Intellectual Property (AIPPI), the Association of University Technology Managers (AUTM), the Fédération Internationale des Conseils en Propriété Industrielle (FICPI) and the Licensing Executives Society International (LESI) and in collaboration with in-house counsel and external experts in technology disputes from different jurisdictions and business areas" -- but that is no reason for you to refuse to participate in it (as this Kat has already done).  By way of incentive,

"The WIPO Center will provide you as a participating respondent with a preview of the Survey results prior to full publication. We would also be pleased to offer to you or to one of your colleagues access to the WIPO Center's Workshop for Mediators or Arbitration Workshop at a considerably reduced registration fee". [Merpel was hoping for 15% off her next mediation bill too ...]

The Survey webpage can be found here.  Enjoy!

Around the blogs. PatLit's PCC Page post this week -- the 23rd in the series -- is entitled "IPOff’s tentacles get some cross-examination?" (here). Apart from discussing cross-examination, this post also begs readers to believe the author when he says that the function of this series was not to show how difficult is the new system for litigating in the Patents County Court for England and Wales, but how easy. 

Before we get to the next round of litigation in the fashion v freedom dispute of Louis Vuitton v Nadia Plesner (here), we have had to await the outcome of Nadia Plesner v Judge Hensen.  There has been a little bit of Jens van den Brinksmanship, which has ended with Judge Hensen stepping down following Ms Plsener's challenge.  A new judge will now handle the injunction hearing on 20 April, says Jens [unless, presumably, he gets challenged too, says Merpel].



Plain packaging worked so well for cigarettes
that they decided to make it compulsory for lawyers too

 The increasingly prolific and indeed enthusiastic Enrico Bonadio (City Law School, London) has just told tytoc collie of a new piece which he has co-authored with Alberto Alemanno) entitled “Do You Mind My Smoking? Plain Packaging of Cigarettes Under the TRIPS Agreement”, published in the current issue of the John Marshall Review of Intellectual Property Law -- and you can read it here on SSRN. This article, after introducing the reader to the genesis and rationale of plain packaging within the broader context of the World Health Organization's Framework Convention on Tobacco Control, offers a detailed analysis of the compatibility of this new packaging measure with the international system for trade mark protection as enshrined in the TRIPS. Enrico will be presenting the contents of this article as a paper at this year's John Marshall Law School IP conference on 15 April (details here).  Says Merpel, presumably the audience will be listening with wrapped attention ...

As vigilant as ever, tytoc collie's Irish friend David Brophy has spotted that, among the items of "urgent" legislation listed today in the Irish Times as going to be published by the Irish Government no later than 21 July of this year is a Patents (Amendment) Bill to ratify the London Agreement on the reduction of translation costs for European patents.  That's nice, say the Kats in unison.

Wednesday whimsies

Fingered.  Last week, in "Coming to their Sensis: of Aussies, scams and the Yellow Peril", tytoc collie featured a report on a successful, if stressful, attempt to drive a scammer off a URL which it should not have been occupying. He now thanks Nadine Courmadias (Legal Counsel, Sensis Pty Ltd) for telling him about the fake yellow page scammer's "inverted fingers" logo (reproduced, left).  The Kat wonders if the new generation of Yellow Pages customers knows why there are any fingers in its logo at all; he seems to recall a slogan, from the distant past when we all used paper products, "Let your fingers do the walking".

Not on your Nellie? Never on a Monday! In "Search Yahoo! for Elly? Not on your Nellie" tytoc collie reported on a dramatic decision from the Tribunale di Roma that an internet service provider could be a contributory copyright infringer where the use of its search engine led users to sites that provided infringing versions of the movie they were seeking. It now seems that the real drama wasn't in the courtroom but in the newspaper reports. As Gaetano Dimita explains: "I finally got my hands to a copy of the Yahoo! case. I found it on Interlex.it, here.  The Italian newspaper reports were inaccurate. The action was a 'procedimento cautelare' (I think the proper translation is 'procedure for interlocutory remedies' or 'preliminary or summary judgment), not a full decision. No further reasoning will be produced. The judge, assessing the 'fumus boni juri' and the 'periculum in mora', ordered Yahoo! to remove the links to infringing websites. Yahoo! did have knowledge of the infringement as a result of notices sent by the plaintiff (PFA Film srl) and, since it did not activate its take-down procedure, it became liable. However, Google Italia and Microsoft (also parties in the proceedings) where not found liable since they did not administer their search engines directly and they were entitled to their costs".

Latest news on the battle between Louis Vuitton and Nadia Plesner (see earlier IPKat post,"Iconic IP and freedom of expression: the battle lies ahead", here, and Poll on tytoc collie's side-bar), comes from Jens van den Brink (Kennedy Van der Laan), who acts for Ms Plesner. There will be a second hearing on the challenge to the appointment of the judge on 4 April, to enable the judge to react to additional grounds for the challenge. Also, a new hearing date for the injunction proceedings has been set: it's 20 April at 14:00 hours, in The Hague court.

Around the blogs.  Congratulations are due to the IP Finance weblog which, founded in January 2008, has now notched up its 900th email subscriber.  PatLit's 22nd PCC Page, "IPOff tells Cautious: “Get knotted"", can be found here, continuing the saga of cut-price, sawn-off litigation in the Patents County Court for England and Wales.  MARQUES Class 46 reports that there are still three or four places available on the "Future Plans" seminar on trade marks in Europe next week.

Casting for a star role
in the Opposition Division ...

Movie buffs take note! A YouTube video which a group of Office for Harmonisation in the Internal Market (OHIM) staff developed in order to explain the benefits of Community trade mark protection to a general audience. The project was supported by OHIM's multimedia team, but the script was developed and "acted" by volunteers drawn from various OHIM departments.  Further information is available from OHIM here.  You can also view the movie here.

Wednesday whimsies

MARQUES's Class 46 weblog has finally published the full programme and list of speakers for its seminar, "Future Plans: next steps for trade marks in Europe", which will be held at the London offices of law firm Simmons & Simmons LLP on Tuesday 5 April (the launch of this seminar featured on this weblog last week). Participants include leading silk Michael Edenborough QC, Appointed Person Anna Carboni, Professor Spyros Maniatis and the IPO's very own Allan James.  You can check the programme and the speakers' credentials here. It's not too late to book -- the venue holds 150 (though, as of this morning, 105 of those places were already taken).

Scams, unsolicited demands for payments and worthless directory entries are all going to be in tytoc collie's line of fire later this week.  He can reveal that a revised version of the MARQUES Class 46 list of websites offering advice and guidance to IP owners and practitioners is likely to be made available on Friday, with the addition of warnings from another four countries (Czech Republic, Ireland, Israel, Slovak Republic).  There are still far too many national patent and trade mark offices that offer no advice or guidance at all -- and it is apparent that most countries have little resolve and inadequate laws to deal with this problem.    If your country is one of them, the time to start campaigning has long passed -- but it's not too late to put things right for the future!


From tytoc collie's friend Chris Torrero comes news that the Legal Information Institute of India (LII of India) has been officially launched in Delhi this month. .LII of India now offers 108 databases (plus a further eight virtual databases), which readers can check out here.  Of particular interest to the IP/IT fraternity are the following:

Indian data -- on a plate!

* Indian Journal of Intellectual Property Law (INJlIPLaw) from 2008
* Indian Journal of Intellectual Property Rights (INJlIPR) from 2002
* Indian Journal of Law and Technology (INJlLawTech) from 2005
* Central Information Commission of India Decisions from 2006
* Indian Cyber Appellate Tribunal from 2010

"I just love that PCC!"

This week's PCC Page, which the PatLit weblog offers on guidance as to how to handle the newly-refreshed Patents County Court for England and Wales, deals with the tactical side of making an offer to settle (here).  And here's a swift reminder: the first decision under the PCC's new procedures was handed down yesterday in Dame Vivienne Westwood OBE v Anthony Edward Knight. A short note on the Dame's judicial triumph can be found on tytoc collie weblog here.

WIPO's mediations can be appealing
for those who want to resolve
disputes without attracting
too much publicity

Given the amount of interest -- and the number of comments -- attracted by tytoc collie's recent features (here and here) on how Creative Commons and Creative Barcode differ from one another, it seems appropriate to record the next Creative Barcode adventure: CB has now arranged for the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO)'s Arbitration and Mediation Center to provide mediation services for registered Creative Barcode members operating under CB's Trust Charter Agreement and who allege that their concepts, disclosed to a third party in business development activities, have been used without permission.  The Kats will all be watching with interest ...

Wednesday whimsies

"Future Plans". The impending seminar organised for MARQUES by its Class 46 weblog on the notorious Max Planck Study commissioned by the European Commission is turning into a triumph for marketing via the social media. The seminar, ""Future Plans: next steps for trade marks in Europe", was launched only mid-day yesterday, but now has more than 60 people registered to attend on the afternoon of Tuesday 5 April at the London office of law firm Simmons & Simmons.  While the final programme is yet to be confirmed, it is known that it will include IPKat blogmeister Jeremy Phillips (who is a long-time MARQUES supporter and helped set up Class 46), leading European trade mark counsel Michael Edenborough QC, Professor Spyros Maniatis, French practitioner Jean-Michel Flu, trade mark attorney Richard Ashmead, Appointed Person and solicitor Anna Carboni, Birgit Clark (who needs no introduction to readers of this blog!) and serial MARQUES activists Adrian Smith and David Stone.  The event is free and will carry CPD points.  See you there?


Scams and misleading demands.   A revised version of the little guide put together by MARQUES Class 46, listing the various websites that provide useful information about businesses that try to extract money from intellectual property proprietors and applicants for rights, is now available here.  It lists 14 official sites and a further four from organisations and businesses.  The compiler is very keen to add more countries to the list (he has now been told that similar 'warning' sites exist via the Czech and Slovak intellectual property offices -- but there seem to be hundreds of countries that offer neither information nor guidance to people who receive horrendously official-looking demands of fees and who will pay up unless they know they don't have to.  An example of the sort of thing we're talking about can be seen on this site which tytoc collie received from his friend Sophie Lachowsky (Arnold & Porter) only this morning.  If your client was directed to a site calling itself Intellectual Property Agency and looking like this, bearing a "scales of justice" logo, would he or she not think it was official?

"What happens to works when they fall into the public domain?"  The 1709 Blog hosts Professor Paul J. Heald next Wednesday, 23 March, at the London office of Olswang LLP.  Details of the seminar, which is free, together with an 'appetiser' from Paul himself, can be found here.  23 folk have already signed up, which means that the critical mass for a decent reception has been achieved in comfort.  Do join us!

tytoc collie was impressed to receive this week a media release headed "IPO Green Channel nominated for Climate Week Award".  It told him that the United Kingdom's Intellectual Property Office is in the running for a Climate Week Award for fast-tracking green patent applications.  The Kat was a little less impressed when he discovered that the nomination was for the "Best Initiative by a Government or Statutory Body", since he doesn't think there's much competition from most of the public sector bodies he has to deal with. Anyway, the winner will be announced on 21 March at the official Climate Week launch event. If you were wondering about the Green Channel,

"The Green Channel was launched in May 2009. The scheme allows applicants to request fast-track processing for any patent where the invention has an environmental benefit. Since its launch, the IPO has accelerated over 350 applications through the scheme in technologies such as wind, solar and hydro power, as well as energy saving devices and vehicles. 

The aim of the Green Channel is to help businesses get environmentally-sound technologies into the market place quickly by ensuring that they do not face undue delays in gaining patent protection. So far 74 patents have been granted under this scheme, in an average time of 8 months from acceleration request to grant. It usually takes an average of 2-3 years to grant a patent in the UK".

Merpel adds: Intellectual Property Minister Baroness Wilcox said something which, in the tradition of IPO press releases quoting IP ministers over the past few years, wasn't worth repeating on this weblog. Says the Kat, if this happens again, this blog will supply its own ministerial quote, much more interesting and enjoyable quote, which will certainly draw far more attention to the Minister than the usual, cautiously banal fare.

Around the blogs. This week PatLit posts the twentieth in its series of PCC Pages, reviewing and explaining the ins and outs of low-cost litigation in England and Wales via the Patents County Court. This week's episode deals with one of the most expensive and often unsatisfactory aspects of any IP litigation, anywhere: expert evidence [note for all those who are baffled by references to the PCC Pages -- a consolidated list of all twenty will soon be posted on the PatLit weblog; the Kat will tell you when this has happened].  The latest offering from the jiplp weblog, which offers free extracts from the Journal of Intellectual Property Law and Practice (JIPLP), is this Current Intelligence note by editorial board member Charles Macedo on patent eligibility in the US and the protection of abstract ideas, arising from Research Corporation Technologies Inc v Microsoft Corp.  

Wednesday whimsies

Around the blogs. Congratulations are due to the most recondite blog on the IP block, The SPC Blog, which has just celebrated the signing-up of its one thousandth email subscriber. There is no truth in the story that this weblog was started as an experiment to see if it was true that there was no subject so obscure, so narrow and technical that you couldn't get people to read a blog on it. All the members of the team are of course overcome with that state of blissful humility that comes from knowing that they couldn't have achieved what they did without the assistance of 996 other people. Well done!

Another day, another blog. tytoc collie is delighted to announce the entry of two new blogs into the intellectual property corner of the blogosphere. The first is the European Patent Office's blog here. Merpel sincerely hopes that whoever writes for it is allowed to be more enjoyable than the product of the authors of some of the Board of Appeal decisions she reads, which seem to have had any possible interest surgically removed before publication. Meanwhile, for those who love password-protected blogs, Kluwer has just set up the Kluwer Copyright Blog, here. This Kat's far too busy to be messing around with passworded weblogs, but feels sure that his friends and readers will tell him how good it is.

If you are a Twitterer, you probably know that tytoc collie and various members of his team occupy a little bit of space there.  You may not know, though, that many IP organisations live there too.  IPKat team member Jeremy is currently baby-sitting the Twitter account along with former MARQUES chair Tove Graulund. If you want to keep half an eye out for European trade mark developments, love Tiny Urls and prefer messages that are incapable of exceeding 140 characters, this may be for you. You can find the account @MARQUES-IP.

Meanwhile, the 19th PCC Page has now appeared on the PatLit weblog, reviewing the current state og various evidential and procedural issues in the impending Patents County Court litigation between Cautious Co and IPOff Ltd over the alleged infringement of IP rights in Cautious's robotic octopus.  You can read it here.  Next week, after the twentieth PCC Page is published, a compendium of all 20 will be posted for ease of readers' access.

If the European Inventor of the Year Award 2011 excites you, here's your link. The European Patent Office has published its list of nominees, all of whom are very impressive even none of them appear to be cats.  tytoc collie wishes them all the best of luck.  Merpel says, is one of the prizes an non-opposable European patent? Now, that would be worth working for!


tytoc collie's friends Peter Watchorn and Andrea Veronese have just published a second edition of their book on the European Patent Convention (EPC), Procedural Law under the EPC-2000 [No, Merpel, says tytoc collie, it's not a sequel to Procedural Law under the EPC, versions 1 to 1999].  Say Peter and Andrea, "We have updated the book to the legal changes which have entered into force over the last three years since the publication of the first edition in 2008. In particular, the much debated "Raising the Bar" rule changes have been explained (search limitations, time limits for filing divisional applications, provision of search results on claimed priorities, indication of amendments and their basis and mandatory response to the European search opinion or the Written Opinion prepared by the EPO in the Patent Cooperation Treaty). We also dealt with the reform of the fee system (the unitary designation fee, shortened prepayment of the renewal fees, page fees due on filing etc) which came into force in 2009. This edition is suitable for study in preparation for and use in the European Qualifying Examination (EQE) of 2012 and also for use by Professional representatives licenced to practice before the EPO". The book's website is here, and if you follow the link on the "Purchase" page, you'll find the sales page of their German publisher, with instructions for purchase in English and in German.

"Exhausted?  Even reading the title wore me out!"

Parallel trade and exhaustion of rights is a subject which, tytoc collie feels, should never have been allowed to dominate European litigation for more than two decades.  This is because all the possible permutations of fact could have been set out as a simple table, separately addressed by the legislature and then enshrined in legislative acts that would have provided clarity and stability for a generation of businesses that have had to sue to find out what the law is.  Enrico Bonardio (IP Law Lecturer, City Law School, London) probably feels rather more happy about the subject, since his article on the topic, "Parallel Imports in a Global Market: Should a Generalised International Exhaustion be the Next Step?", has just been published in the European Intellectual Property Review. Since it's also on SSRN you can read it there too.  If you're too fatigued to press the link, the plot spoiler is this: Enrico argues that only international exhaustion is consistent with the spirit, provisions and targets of the World Trade Organization (WTO) multilateral trading system and should therefore be imposed on all WTO countries [yes, says Merpel, but isn't that the reason why exhaustion was left out of the TRIPS Agreement?]. 

Those readers who have good memories for names will recall that yesterday tytoc collie was reporting on his Turkish ban, thanks to some inside information from Turkish IP scholar Burcu Kilic. The same good soul needs a little help, if you can spare it. Burcu is currently working on that Cinderella of IP rights, utility model (UM) protection. Noting their origin as a device for fostering and protecting innovations by SMEs at an affordable price, she is particularly interested in whether there remains any justification for UM systems within Europe today, given the range of other rights and options open to innovative businesses and those who invest in them. If you have any useful personal experiences or interesting thoughts about UMs, can you please email Burcu here, and tell her that the Kat said you should contact her.

Wednesday whimsies

Following yesterday's post, "Anti-scam: a call for cooperation" (here), tytoc collie is delighted to report that  the MARQUES Class 46 initiative is gaining momentum.  Anti-scam guidance from 14 websites is now available from Class 46 here.  Says tytoc collie, let's get this information promulgated as quickly as possible, to save the small, the poor and the innocent from wasting their precious cash on unproductive and/or fraudulent demands.  Merpel's not so pleased.  There are around 200 countries floating around, and most of them don't seem to have any anti-scam sites at all.  Also, the supply of contact details and easily searchable data is very, very patchy: there's a vast amount still to be done.  STOP PRESS: since updating the Class 46 guide, information concerning another useful site -- Mark-Echt's Spookfacturen -  which will be added to the guide when it's next updated.

The art of the blog.  tytoc collie's not much of a linguist, as is widely known, but with the aid of a well-known search engine's translation facilities he thinks there's plenty food for thought at the Markenserviceblog, directed by Prehm & Klare (Rechtsanwälte) and boasting an archive that goes all the way back to December 2006. "Automatic reversion clauses in copyright assignments: do they work?", by IP transactional sage Mark Anderson, is on offer from the jiplp weblog here.  The latest PCC Page on PatLit gives a flavour of what it's actually like to be doing the legwork around the lovely buildings in London's Park Crescent in an attempt to launch your cut-price IP litigation before the Patents County Court for England and Wales. And on the subject of patents, there's some valuable advice on how to refer to a patent in a court order or in pleadings.


The blog of the art.  Check out Art & Artifice, the art-and-law blog which is not quite two months old and is already maturing into a nice little source for legal and current information about that sweet space in which art meets law.  Latest post is news of Maria Mercedes Frabboni's "Who owns the orphans?" project -- and a tasty reception too!

On 12 May, as the darling buds dance o'er London's leafy boughs, IPKat team member Jeremy will be chairing "When Intellectual Property Meets Competition Law: Protecting Rights Without Protectionism".  This one-day CLT conference programme promises to do its best to make competition law (i) intelligible and (ii) non-intimidating to our IP brethren.  The programme brochure is here.  See you there?

From darling buds to budding athletes. The London Marathon fundraising season is in full  bloom, and tytoc collie's good friend Anna Carboni -- solicitor, scholar, Appointed Person, JIPLP editorial board person and generally lovely person -- is making her once-every-ten-years sortie into the world of self-mortification known as athletics. Together with her husband Marius she is raising money for Hospice in the Weald,  Anna and Marius's fundraising page is here.  Please give!

Wednesday whimsies

Don't like how IP is handled elsewhere? If you have not yet participated in the third Taylor Wessing Global Intellectual Property Index survey, there's still time to do so. You get a chance to say which of the 20+ selected jurisdictions run their IP administration and litigation, and which are, welll, dodos.  Click PatLit here for further details.

Free trial still on offer.  This is not the cost of a legal trial, however.  Oxford University Press's monthly Journal of Intellectual Property Law and Practice (JIPLP) is still offering, for the last few days, free access.  All you need to do is to enter a trial code. To set yourself up to avail yourself of this golden opportunity, simply click through to the instructions page and the rest should be easy.  If you can't be bothered. you can still get some idea what the journal's like by dipping into some of the content which is made available at no cost via its associated jiplp weblog here. STOP PRESS: there doesn't seem to be a code any more. The Kat will investigate on his return from Madrid.

Meanwhile, let us celebrate the fact that Oxford University Press --which is part of the University -- has charitable objectives.  This means partly that it can give publications away to worthy educational causes, and also that it can make some jolly generous discounts when it has its winter sale.  Books on offer at up to 75% off the regular price can be found here.  They include the Associate's Guide to the Practice of Copyright Law, which this Kat thought, when reviewing it for another blog, was very handy for non-US readers.

PatLit's latest PCC Page -- the 17th in the series -- asks whether a business which is suing for IP infringement in the Patents County Court for England and Wales might find that it is the victim of its own success, in that this makes the dispute too big, in terms of value, to qualify for the court's jurisdiction. To find out more, click here.

Ever wondered what happens to works once they enter the public domain? If so, there's a seminar just for you.  On the afternoon of Wednesday 23 March the 1709 Blog is happy to host a talk on exactly that subject by American live-wire academic Paul J. Heald.  While the details and the venue (somewhere in London) remain to confirmed, just email here, with the subject line 'Heald Seminar', if you'd like to attend.

The MARQUES Winter Meeting takes place tomorrow and Friday in Madrid. IPKat team member Jeremy will be there -- and he will be writing the event up on the MARQUES Class 46 weblog. But don't worry, there will still be plenty to read on this blog too ...

Wednesday whimsies

Hats off to design
for the future!

Once again the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) is taking heed of tytoc collie's exhortations. Just two short days after this weblog lamented that the world's favourite IP agency hadn't updated its World Intellectual Property Day website, it did (and the evidence is here). It would be churlish to complain when an international agency complies with tytoc collie’s writ BUT, while the updated site now gives us this year’s theme (“Designing the future”) and a bit more to go on, there is none of the usual attractive artwork and downloads for the Kat to cut-and-paste. No copyright problems, we hope …


Not behind the times, like the WIPO might just occasionally be, but commendably ahead of it, is the Court of Justice of the European Union.  Remarkably, given its occasion bursts of inactivity, the Curia has updated its case law search page to 13 May 2011, as you can see by clicking here (this will only work until the correct is restored by the Curia reader who reads this blog, though he or she pretends not to ...).  This Kat thanks a fellow feline, Mark, for the pointer.

Around the blogs. It’s not often that you see a book review being vaunted as a masterpiece, but Chris Wadlow’s magnificent “Butterworths Book of Sand”, which you can find on jiplp, is a must for all who love patents and the short stories of Jorge Luis Borges. The 1709 Blog carries a brief obituary for the notorious copyright infringement proceedings brought by the late Media CAT (no relation) against 26 named alleged porno-file-sharers.  The 15th episode of Cautious v IPOff, chronicled weekly by the PatLit weblog, can be perused here. IP Tango reports that Ecuador has affirmed the notion that intellectual property rights are constitutional rights, here, and there have been some developments in the investigation of the murder of customs officer and anti-counterfeit expert Johan Nortje, recorded here on Afro-IP.

Ontario, when
the snow melts

If Canada' patent law means something to you, now's your chance to have a say.  Information received from the Kat's old friend Andrea Rush (Heenan Blaikie) is that Canada's Patent Branch has begun consultation on Chapter 14 of its Manual of Patent Office Practice (MOPOP) which deals with Unity of Invention.  The draft revised Chapter 14 was released for public consultation on Monday and you can check it out here. Stakeholders have the opportunity to provide comments on the draft chapter until 7 April 2011, when the ice starts to thaw and Canadians turn their thoughts to spring. For more information, says Andrea, you can visit CIPO’s What'’s New website.


tytoc collie has learned with sadness of the death of Michael Cohn late last month.  Michael took over the practice of his father's firm, Reinhold Cohn and :Partners, which he ran for some 40 years until he retired in 2000.  An active member of the AIPPI, he was also a knowledgeable and thoughtful soul with whom it was always a pleasure to share a discussion on IP or wider issues. He will be very much missed.

Wednesday whimsies

tytoc collie's friend and trade mark enthusiast Keith Farwell (Phillips & Leigh) sadly died towards the end of last year at the very young age of 45.  His widow Rebecca is creating a very positive monument to his life by raising money for Kidney Research UK in his memory. Donations can be made via JustGiving here.

There's lots going on at PatLit these days.  The 14th in the series of PCC Pages on the Patents County Court for England Wales deals with the risk of a threats action here; the debate over damages for infringing a patent which is subsequently held to be invalid continues here and here, together with readers' comments.  And there's also a report on Axel Horns' criticism of the European Patent Office's attempts at data capture when making the second edition of Patent Litigation in Europe -- and on what can be done to avoid it.

Google Transliteration isn't a service that this Kat knew about, till reader Chris Torrero pointed it out to him.  According to the available information, 

"Google Transliteration allows you to type phonetically using Roman characters. Simply type a word the way it sounds in English and Google Transliteration will convert it to its local script. We currently support 24 languages: Amharic, Arabic, Bengali, Chinese, Greek, Gujarati, Hebrew, Hindi, Japanese, Kannada, Malayalam, Marathi, Nepali, Oriya, Persian, Punjabi, Russian, Sanskrit, Serbian, Sinhalese, Tamil, Telugu, Tigrinya and Urdu."

You can check it out for yourself here.  It ought to be some use to anyone who wants to know what his trade marks look like in other scripts. Do let the Kats know what you think of it, but please -- no jokes about "litter" ...

From Luxembourg today comes news of one ruling from the General Court that caught the Kat's eye.  It's Case T-437/09 Oyster Cosmetics SpA v Office for Harmonisation in the Internal Market, Kadabell GmbH & Co. KG. It was not the world's most exciting and controversial of Community trade mark oppositions. Oyster sought to register the Oyster mark represented here for : ‘Bleaching preparations and other substances, all for laundry use; cleaning, polishing, degreasing and abrasive preparations; soaps; perfumery, essential oils, cosmetics, hair lotions; hair colorants; dentifrices’ (all in Class 3) and Kadabell opposed, citing its earlier Oystra mark (also represented here) for ‘Soaps, perfumeries, essential oils, preparations for body and beauty care, hair lotions, dentifrices’ (Class 3). The marks were found to be similar, as were the goods, and it was no surprise that the Opposition Division, the Board of Appeal and now the General Court thought so too. But what surprised the Kat was this line taken from the account of the proceedings before the Opposition Division:

"...  the Opposition Division upheld the opposition in part. The opposition was rejected only in respect of the goods ‘preparations for cleaning waste pipes’. Those goods were not in the list of goods provided with the registration application. They were, however, in the English translation of that list, on which the Opposition Division based its decision".

This can't really be true, can it? Is Oyster really going be landed with a Community trade mark for a description of goods which it didn't apply for and which, Merpel mewses, isn't anything that Oyster Cosmetics makes or is likely to do so, simply because of a random bureaucratic decision that has nothing to do with reality?

Sticking the knife into
a cheese that's a legend?

Around the other blogs.  "Initial interest confusion recognised by the English Courts", a JIPLP Current Intelligence note by Baker & McKenzie duo Peter O'Byrne and Ben Allgrove, is available in full here on the jiplp weblog.  Art & Artifice picked up first the good news that there'd been no looting at the Egyptian Musuem, followed by the sad news that there had.  There's a difference of opinion between two of tytoc collie's favourite bloggers, Edith Van den Eede of Class 46 (here) and Patricia Covarrubia of IP Tango (here) on the merits of Colombia protecting Italy's Parmigiano Reggiano cheese as a geographical indication. The 1709 Blog provides a very thoughtful little piece, "The Work of Art in the Age of Digital Reproduction", from the very thoughtful Hugo Cox, here.  A total of 259 people have now signed the Afro-IP petition calling for an investigation into the murder of fake-fighter John Nortje here.