Friday fantasies

Amanda Telfer. Many readers may have read in the British press about the tragic loss of Amanda Telfer, following the freak accident which befell her in Central London last week. Valued IPKat subscriber and supporter Amanda, an intellectual property and media consultant solicitor with Keystone Law, was a popular and respected IP enthusiast, who will be greatly missed by her many friends, colleagues and clients. "A Life Interrupted ... ", which was published in the London Evening Standard earlier this week, sums up our loss, and the feelings of many of us, in eloquent terms.

Oxford journal gets a German partner. Last night the news broke that the Journal of Intellectual Property Law & Practice (JIPLP) had brokered a surprising deal with Gewerblicher Rechtsschutz und Urheberrecht, Internationaler Teil (GRUR Int.).  The deal will see each journal setting aside a section of each issue so that it can be filled with content provided by the other.  So far as this member of the IPKat team can recall, he thinks this is the first time such a venture has been attempted in modern IP publishing history and, as editor of JIPLP, he's very keen to make it work [Merpel says, has anyone noticed that the first five letters of GRUR Int. are an anagram of GURRI ...?].

Morocco: as close
as ACTA gets
to Europe

ACTA news. Japan has become the latest country to ratify the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA), following -- in alphabetical order -- Australia, Canada, South Korea, Mexico, Morocco, New Zealand, Singapore and the United States.  Readers of this weblog may recall that the Agreement has not proved popular in some quarters, for a variety of reasons. The IPKat has read this list several times and still can't find any European countries in it, though he did initially misread Morocco as Monaco ...

Around the weblogs. First, congratulations to the jiplp weblog, which yesterday welcomed its 700th email subscriber. Secondly, congratulations to the Allliance Against IP Theft for changing its name to the Alliance For Intellectual Property, a very positive step reported on the MARQUES Class 46 weblog here.  IP Finance hosts an excellent analysis by regular guest blogger Keith Mallinson to the effect that there are not, repeat not, too many patents in the world. Meanwhile, over on Art & Artifice, Rachel Buker reports on a curious sequel to that blog's earlier Ecce Home post.  Finally, the 1709 Blog asks for information concerning the background to a fresh case being referred to the Court of Justice of the European Union, this being Case C-355/12 Nintendo, on technological protection measures and other popular hobbies ...