WEDNESDAY WONDERINGS

1 Oh, the embarrassment (but thanks)!

The mid-summer issue of Managing Intellectual Property features its third annual list of the 50 Most Influential People in Intellectual Property. This list, for the first time ever, contains the names of 49 human beings and one fictional Kat.

The IPKat, on behalf of his blogmeisters, would like to take this opportunity of saying a big "thanks" to all of his readers and interlocutors: your comments and your insights have helped make this all possible.


2 ... and what else is in the current MIP?

This being the summer, it's time for the combined July-August issue of Managing Intellectual Property. This issue leads with a strong piece by MIP's editorial team of Emma Barraclough, Sam Mamoudi and editor James Nurton on the increasingly complex interaction between the drive to establish common technological standards in the high-tech and communications sector and the demand for a return on private IP investment.

There's also what the IPKat rates as one of the most important articles published in any journal this year: the piece by Ben Goodger and Patsy Day (Rouse & Co) on the likely dire impact of the UNCITRAL Convention on the Assignment of Receivables in International Trade upon IP royalty-bearing transactions. If ever you depend upon licensees gathering in royalties from sublicensees and then passing them on to you, read this with fear and trepidation ...


3 Thirsty thief may have drunk Weapon of Mass Destruction

That's about the most bizarre headline to have been given to an IPKat story, but it fits the tale pretty well. Ananova cites The Scotsman as reporting that a clear plastic two-litre bottle of melted Antarctic ice going by the name of "Weapon of Mass Destruction", supposedly a work of art by one Wayne Hill, was missing, presumed drunk to the last drop by a thirsty thief.

Said Mr Hill:

"It looked like an ordinary bottle of water, but it was on a plinth, labelled, described and in the programme of the whole festival. It was very, very clear what it was - a work of art".

He apparently added:

"Nobody has any idea what has happened to it. It was there and then it was gone".

The alleged work of art was valued at £42,500. If it were drunk, the IPKat thinks he knows what might have happened to it, but he's not going to say ... He also wonders at the artist's name, "Wayne Hill", since that's also the name of a Water Resources Center in Georgia, USA.

More overpriced, overrated water here