Friday fantasies

Friday today! Time to check the IPKat's Forthcoming Events page ...

Dedication.  The July issue of the Journal of Intellectual Property Law and Practice (JIPLP) leads with an article, "Case law of the Polish Community Trade Mark and Designs Court: 2008–2010" by Krystyna Żurawska, Przemysław Samoder and Tomasz Rychlicki.  This article is dedicated to the memory of the lovely and vivacious Berenika Depo, who died so suddenly, less than a year ago.  The authors describe her as "our friend and mentor, the wonderful and unforgettable Polish and European Patent attorney, who also greatly contributed to jurisprudence of the Polish Community Trade Marks and Designs Court". We all miss her.  For the rest of the contents of this issue click here.


Around the blogs.  Professor Steve Peers, of the University of Essex, has done the patent litigation community a huge and noble service by providing this commentary for PatLit on the fresh -- and more realistic -- proposals for what is now just the Unified Patent Court.  The 1709 Blog asks whether the Google Books not-yet-and-perhaps-never Settlement needs holistic treatment rather than being viewed as a copyright phenomenon alone, while Afro-IP relates a tale of annoyance and frustration for GlaxoSmithkline on being on the wrong end of what appears to be the largest trade mark damages award in African history following the surprise decision that its PANADOL product bore an infringing mark.

A reader asks, "Do you know if there are any publicly accessible (online preferably) databases of European IP lawyers, patent and trade mark attorneys, and if so where might I if find such databases?"  Not offhand, says this Kat, but there's no harm in asking ...

Transparency and IP governance in the European Union.  The AmeriKat tried to kickstart a debate on this very subject earlier today, but from the lack of respnse it seems that (i) everyone agrees with her, or (ii) everyone disagrees with her, so in either case there's no point in saying anything, or that (iii) it can wait till after Andrew Murray's expected defeat at Wimbledon. This Kat adds a little paw-note.  Earlier this week a litigant in proceedings before the Office for Harmonisation in the Internal Market (OHIM) wanted to know the nationalities of the members of the Board of Appeal which had presided over an appeal to which he was party.  He was told that the Office was not allowed to give out this information.  This Kat wonders why.  The city and country of birth of every Board of Appeal member is clearly stated in the Council Decision which appoints that member; this Decision is a publicly accessible document which is published in the Official Journal of the European Union and available online to anyone who chooses to read it.  For the record, the Board consisted of two from Greece and one from France.

Orwell Prize-winning journalist Johann Hari appears to have been perfecting a new species of plagiarism, in which he helps himself to the contents of his interviewees' books when he writes up interviews with their authors.. This report in the Guardian gives some examples. Critics of this unusual journalistic technique have been described as "politically motivated".  Merpel notes that the Orwell Prize is named for George Orwell, author of Animal Farm, a satire at the end of which it becomes impossible to distinguish the formerly revolutionary animals from the humans against whom they rebelled. Here we have a situation in which it is impossible to tell the real interview from its literary antecedents ...