Friday flounderings

The IPKat's 'Forthcoming Events' feature, which you will find in the left-hand side-bar of this weblog's front page, contains some fresh entries which you may not yet have seen. Don't forget to check them out.


True or false? In over 165 years since Venezuela introduced a patent system, no court has ever made a ruling that a patent is valid and enforceable. Click here to read Richard N. Brown's challenging article on Venezuela's fascinating patent system.


Pitiblawg is nothing to do with pity: it's an intellectual property/information technology law weblog masterminded by Daniel Torres Gonçalves -- an Edinburgh (Scotland) based Portuguese scholar who is a member of the Scripted editorial board. He blogs in Portuguese. You can check his blog out here.


By Hague Notification No. 87 the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) announces that the Republic of Lithuania has recently deposited its instrument of accession to the Geneva Act of the Hague Agreement Concerning the International Registration of Industrial Designs. The Geneva Act will enter into force in respect of Lithuania on 26 September 2008. With accession, all three Baltic States will now be part of the increasingly-popular Hague system (full list of members here).


The Ninth Edition of the Butterworths Intellectual Property Handbook, to which IPKat team blogger Jeremy is Consultant Editor, is now under preparation nd will be published in late 2009. If you are a user of this weighty tome -- the Eighth Edition runs to 2,161 pages which makes it pretty cheap at just £106 -- and you have any bright ideas as to what should be included in the Ninth Edition, please email Jeremy here and let him know. Everyone who suggests any useful additional content will be put into a hat (well, their names will ...) and the lucky winner of a completely random draw will receive a copy for a prize.


Via Reuters and the Wall Street Journal (thanks to Matthew Gilchrist) comes the news that Verizon Communications Inc, Google Inc, Cisco Systems Inc, Hewlett-Packard Co and Ericsson are believed to be teaming up to defend themselves against potential patent-infringement lawsuits by buying up key intellectual property before it falls into the hands of trolls who could use it against them. Businesses joining this little group (is it a cartel? is it a standards-setting body?) will pay around $250,000 to join plus a further $5 million in escrow with a view to marking future patent purchases. Says the IPKat, this just goes to show how fertile the patent system is, as yet another business model develops ...
Friday flounderings Friday flounderings Reviewed by Jeremy on Friday, July 04, 2008 Rating: 5

3 comments:

  1. Here's another one - this incredible paragraph/sentence appeared in the July PCT Newsletter, published today:

    "Following the promulgation of modifications to Sections 706 and 710 of the Administrative Instructions under the PCT (relating to the electronic filing and processing of international applications) with effect from 1 July 2008 (see PCT Newsletter No. 05/2008, page 2, and Official Notices (PCT Gazette) of 24 April 2008, pages 45 et seq.), the International Bureau (IB) has notified, in its capacity as receiving Office, and the Offices listed below have notified the IB, in their capacity as receiving Offices, of the replacement, in their notifications pertaining to the filing and processing in electronic form of international applications (see the PCT Gazette reference following the name of each Office/State), of the paragraph relating to the filing of backup copies by a text relating to the inclusion of documents in pre-conversion format."

    And they say the PCT is unnecessarily complex?!? Nah!

    ReplyDelete
  2. Those of us who don't use Butterworths Intellectual Property Handbook might have suggestions of what could be added to it if we had a list of the existing Contents (not found on the Butterworth site - not on Amazon). We might even be inspired to become users!

    ReplyDelete
  3. ...but I should have looked at Google books...

    ReplyDelete

All comments must be moderated by a member of the IPKat team before they appear on the blog. Comments will not be allowed if the contravene the IPKat policy that readers' comments should not be obscene or defamatory; they should not consist of ad hominem attacks on members of the blog team or other comment-posters and they should make a constructive contribution to the discussion of the post on which they purport to comment.

It is also the IPKat policy that comments should not be made completely anonymously, and users should use a consistent name or pseudonym (which should not itself be defamatory or obscene, or that of another real person), either in the "identity" field, or at the beginning of the comment. Current practice is to, however, allow a limited number of comments that contravene this policy, provided that the comment has a high degree of relevance and the comment chain does not become too difficult to follow.

Learn more here: http://ipkitten.blogspot.com/p/want-to-complain.html

Powered by Blogger.