Latest JIPLP; Essential trade mark conference; Perfect 10

Although the electronic version has been available online to subscribers for some weeks, the IPKat only regards the Journal of Intellectual Property Law and Practice as being published once he gets the paper version. Well, the May 2007 issue is now out, and it's definitely not bad (note the typically British understatement). Among the features in this issue are

* a masterly survey of the non-patentability of essentially biological processes under the European Patent Convention by Michael A. Kock (Syngenta);

* a further discussion, this time by Paul England (Herbert Smith), of the recent seismic British case law on the (non)patentability of computer related inventions;

* David Fleming (Brinks Hofer Gilson & Lione) writing on Re Organon, in which the TTAB ruled that the flavour orange was not registrable as a trade mark for quick-dissolving anti-depressant pills;

* an exploration of post-sale confusion doctrine in English and European law by Baker & McKenzie lawyers Peter O'Byrne and Ben Allgrove [note: JIPLP will be exploring this issue again later this year, with some detailed analysis of ECJ doctrine by Noam Shemtov].

JIPLP's very own home page here
Full contents in this issue (including abstracts) here
Instructions for authors here; if you want to subscribe, click here
For a free sample click here
To read the editorial in full ("People in Greenhouses", on the role of responsible IP in the current environmental crisis), click here


If you've nothing better to do on Tuesday 12 June and you're getting the Trade Mark Itch, check out the programme for CLT's one-day event, The Essential Trade Mark Conference, and see if it comes up to scratch. IPKat team blogger Jeremy - who chairs the event - is speaking on two topics: Picking Winners and Losers (this topic seeks to integrate legal input into a topic often wrongly monopolised by marketeers) and Developing a Brand (which examines different legal devices for protecting a brand as it is pushed out from its original role and leveraged in different ways).

Right: lunch will be provided - but not this one ...

Other speakers are Anat Paz (Lovells), Aaron Wood (trade mark attorney and international man of mystery), Mark Bezant (LECG), Tom Hays (Lewis Silkin) and Declan Cushley (Browne Jacobson). For those who might have been thinking of sneaking off before the end, there are two fully interactive Workshop Sessions. See you there?


The TechnoLlama was first to let the IPKat know what the US Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit did last week in Perfect 10 v Amazon.com and Google Inc (full text of the judgment here).

Left: not the TechnoLlama but the DeliLlama

This decision is a must-read decision for anyone who is concerned with the development of copyright doctrine in the field of cached thumbnails. As the TechnoLlama says:

"At the heart of the direct infringement case is Google's practice of displaying reduced-sized inline pictures. An inline is an HTML element that displays content hosted elsewhere. Perfect 10's argument was that such depictions are directly infringing copyright, and the district court agreed in first instance. Now the Ninth Circuit has found that these images were not direct infringement, because they were not "copied" in the important sense, a decision that will be welcome by bloggers and website designers everywhere".

The IPKat is really torn by this one. Like any other red-blooded blogger he relies on the existence of inline thumbnails and welcomes the result, yet when he reads this decision he can't help feeling that there has been a little bit of legerdemain at play in the reasoning and he can't quite place his paw on it. Merpel says, the Germans probably have a word for it - the feeling of residual guilt that remains after you've discovered that one of your illicit pleasures was lawful after all.