WEDNESDAY WORDS OF WISDOM ...

1 Just three cases this time ...

... but the July 2005 issue of Butterworths' Intellectual Property and Technology Cases has a sleek, black shiny feel to it. This month's trio are

* Dyson Ltd v Qualtex (UK) Ltd, a glorious battle before Mr Justice Mann in which the defendants, seeking to justify their unlicensed manufacture and sale of vacuum cleaner spare parts, spent 16 days raising every possible defence -- and losing;

* PepsiCo Inc v OHIM (the RUFFLES/RIFFLES Community trade mark opposition case), where the Court of First Instance had to consider some interesting observations concerning co-existence/equivalence of Community and national trade marks;

* Mayne Pharma Pty v Pharmacia Italia SpA, an England and Wales Court of Appeal decision arising from an application for a declaration of non-infringement of an epirubicin patent.

The IPKat reminds his readers that the IP&T series is the paper-based accomanpaniment to what is principally an online law report subscription service. Merpel says, I thought Reed Elsevier, who own the Butterworths/LexisNexis empire, are dead set on jettisoning paper products for the online ones ...


2 Something to read on the beach

The IPKat likes a good read now and again. And when it's too hot for sunbathing he quite likes to lie in the shade. The WTO, Intellectual Property Rights and the Knowledge Economy, edited by Keith E. Maskus (left) and published last year by Edward Elgar, fulfils both of those desiderata. Weighing in at 648 pages, it casts a pretty good shadow in the sun. More importantly its editor, a Professor in the Department of Economics at the University of Colorado, Boulder, has assembled a strong selection of 21 essays, penned between 1991 and 2003 by a highly respectable roster of contributors, on the Brave New World of TRIPs -- where economics meets IP law, where trade meets monopoly barriers, where North meets South and (in the IPKat's opinion) where ideology dashes itself against the rockface of reality.

With a web price of £135, this book will set you back any number of seaside ice-creams, but what it lacks in sweet immediacy of pleasure it more than makes up for in permanence of intellectual benefit.