Monday miscellany

Many IPKat followers were holidaying when the Kat announced Boliven's special deal for readers -- a free full one-month trial of the BolivenPRO search facility. So if the thought of ploughing through over 100 million peer-reviewed documents excites you, this could be your golden opportunity. Details of how to register for the special offer can be found here.


While on the subject of special offers, there are a couple of conferences coming up for which IPKat readers can claim a 10% discount. They are as follows:

• 28 September 2011, Online Brand Protection 2011, organised by Informa at Le Meridien Piccadilly, in the heart of London. Hear from speakers from international organisations as they discuss these and a host of other issues critical for brand protection professionals. Quote VIP Code FKW82229IPKL when you register. Full details are available here.
  
  
• 6 October 2011, Social Media & the Law, held at the very comfy and convenient Millennium Knightsbridge, London and organised by Informa: "The essential event for everyone involved in navigating the legal challenges of exploiting social media and user-generated content". Quote VIP Code FKW82232IPKL on registering. Full details are available here.

A word of appreciation is never amiss, and this Kat thinks it's nicer to express one's gratitude to someone while they are still alive rather than save it all up for their obituary.  Thank you, Adam Smith, for all your hard work, clear thinking, investigative reporting, incisive comments and unorthodox dress sense during your stint writing for World Trademark Review.  Adam is off to study for a Master’s degree in science journalism and we all wish him well.  Well-wishers can hunt Adam down via LinkedIn here.

Around the weblogs.  IP Finance has posted a couple of hefty contributions of late.  In the first, Keith Mallinson (WiseHarbor) defends the non-interventionist approach which the EU takes towards horizontal cooperation agreements against the criticisms levelled by the European Committee for Interoperable Systems (ECIS), which supports the mandatory disclosure of the most restrictive licensing terms for patented IP in the purportedly different “software” sector.  By the way, if you are interested in patents and standards within the telecoms sector, you can follow Keith now on Twitter at @WiseHarbor. The second, by IPKat team member Neil, focuses on how the impact and the cost of piracy varies so much from jurisdiction to jurisdiction, asking why this might be so.  Elsewhere, PatLit's saga of the Octopus litigation in its PCC Pages series has reached episode 38, with a discussion of what to do when the alleged infringer doesn't seem to be complying properly with a discovery/disclosure order.