ECJ HOLIDAYS; WHAT'S IN A ****?

ECJ holidays

The Court of Justice of the European Communities and the Court of First Instance will be on its holidays from Monday 18 December 2006 until Sunday 7 January 2007. The IPKat wishes the members of the court well and hopes they will return fresh and invigorated from their break.

Right: under the proposed Leisure Resources Regulation, land-locked EU Member States such as Luxembourg, host to the ECJ, will be given its own luxuriant Mediterranean coastline.


What's in a ****?

The IPKat has complained on occasion about the use of the title "What's in a name?" for articles concerning trade marks and brands. The title, which is lazy and hackneyed, generates over 1.3 million Google hits, a figure that is (sadly) likely to grow as people think they're being clever when they're not. But ...

... today for the first time the IPKat received an article called "What's in a name?" that wasn't about brands - remarkably it's about patent attorneys. Penned by the indefatiguable Dennis Crouch (of Patently-O fame), it compares the names most commonly found among US patent attorneys with the ranking of most common surnames in the US census. Smith and Johnson come first and second on both lists, but there are notable variations further down, where Lee, Kim, Chen, Murphy, Nguyen, Young, Wang and Cohen are all over-represented. Wang is the best performer in terms of patents, being the 19th most common patent attorney name although it's only the 1,026th most common US surname. Next most spectacular surname is Chen (730th in the national rankings, but tenth among patent attorneys). Admittedly this comparison employs the 1990 census figures, since the 2000 census names aren't available yet, but it makes gripping reading. Merpel says, what about US patent examiners ...?

A Wang by any other name here, here and here
Man with no name here