... and some more reading matter

The April issue of Euromoney's ten times a year Managing Intellectual Property was so big (being another 164-page whopper) that the IPKat can't imagine how he has failed to spot it on his desk over the past week or two. Well, he did - even though it even carries one of Jeremy's articles (a shortish notes on trends, or perhaps the lack of them, in national trade mark litigation in the European Union over the past year, with a couple of examples thrown in for good measure).

Resisting the temptation to pack the issue with trade mark content (this being the INTA special issue), editor James Nurton has preserved its balance: other topics featured include technology transfer, latest ant-counterfeit techniques, software security, the US Supreme Court decision in MedImmune and the usual splash of news and views from around the world. Best feature of all is the lengthy report on the roundable discussion on global brand strategies, where the editor has gathered together a group of experts - drawn from IP owners and private practitioners - to discuss a number of self-selecting key issues. The IPKat suspects that the main difference between the experts and the rest of us is that they're just better at doing their jobs than we are, because they don't seem to have any ideas that the rest of us don't know. Unless, says Merpel, they keep their best ideas to themselves when speaking to the IP press and thus retain the initiative when dealing with others ...

Contents and features here


"The Confused Continent" is the legend on the front cover of the March/April issue of World Trademark Review, launched at last year's INTA and already becoming a firm favourite with many of the trade mark profession's more discerning readers. The feature to which the title refers is all about the fact that, while trade mark is increasingly harmonised throughout the European Union, "those who practise it remain a disparate bunch", bearing a variety of qualifications (or lack thereof) and possessing different powers of representation. Personally the IPKat isn't too worried about this disparity - if you get rid of it, then you are probably causing greater disparities between different species of practitioner within each jurisdiction. Also worth a good look is the warning by Adrian Punderson (Ashworth Inc) concerning the threats from within that can lead to counterfeiting when legitimate manufacturers don't keep a keen eye on their own operations.

Full contents of issue 6 here