Four competitions and an UGG appeal

Competition 1: midnight last night was the closing date for the haiku competition for which the prize is complimentary admission to CLT's conference on IP in the Educational Sector, next Thursday 19 March 2009 (click here for full programme). There was a better-than-usual crop of entries, so the IPKat could be quite choosy. Commendations go to the following:

However hard I
look, there is no trade mark on
White Chrysanthemum
Gerry Gavigan

Urged to teach IP
my spring work's ownership lies
with those who urge me
Amanda Harcourt

Wise educators
winter of economic tears!
look to IP
Paula Williams 

Obvious mistake
Clearly - but the correction
Likewise obvious
Tim Roberts

No one would dare to
sue a Professor like me
for breach of IP.
Paul Maclennan

and the winner is ...

Summer essay done
Too much copied says teacher
Fair use says pupil
Antony Gallafent

Well done, Antony, please get in touch and I'll sort out your complimentary registration. And thanks to everyone who submitted entries, all of which were appreciated and most of which fell within the classical haiku rules.


Competition 2: back in November of last year the IPKat, inspired by WIPO's own quest for postrity, instigated a competition to name the three things that it would be most appropriate to bury beneath the new WIPO Building.  Sadly, the competition did not attract as many entries as the Kat had hoped -- and the objects which competitors deemed worthy of being interred in the concrete foundations of WIPO Tower included several former employees of that organisation as well as a number of current members of the judiciary. However, prompted by a couple of entrants, the IPKat has remembered that the announcement of a winner is long overdue. Best of the bunch was the list suggested by occasional IPKat guest blogger Thorsten Lauterbach, who came up with

* a CD labelled "Endangered Species", featuring early sound recordings by Sir Cliff Richard, Roger Daltrey, Johnny Hallyday et al, with a sleeve note written by Internal Market Commissioner Charlie McCreevy and French President Sarkozy;

* a copy of the Draft WIPO Database Treaty, cobwebbed in the starting blocks since 1996 and

* a "Stornoway Black Pudding", sporting an "EU Protected Status" tag to appease the IP ghosts beyond the building's foundations.

Well done, Thorsten! You get the prize copy of Gringras: the Laws of the Internet by Elle Todd (details here).


Competition 3: through no fault of his own, the IPKat finds himself in possession of a spare copy of a very worthy book, Contemporary Intellectual Property: Law and Policy, written by the triumvirate of Hector MacQueen, Charlotte Waelde and Graeme Laurie and published last year by Oxford University Press (you can see the details for yourself here).

Why not put it to good use, says the IPKat? So here's a competition (deadline, midnight, Sunday 22 March, GMT), for which the book -- and there's more than a thousand pages of it -- is the prize.  In not more than 50 words, explain how you would invest £1 million if you had to invest it in one or more IP right.  Please email your entries to the IPKat here, with the subject line IP-Invest. As usual, the best entries will be published, so be careful if your job is in the IP investment sector!


Competition 4: not an IPKat competition, this time, but one which emanates from a sister weblog, PatLit.  The prize is complimentary registration to the Patents Advanced: Litigation seminar, organised by MBL Seminars and run by Richard Hodgson on the afternoon of Wednesday 22 April.  You can get details of the event and the competition from PatLit here. 

UGG appeal. The IPKat's friend and fellow-blogger Shireen Smith wonders whether anyone who works for Deckers reads her blog. If they don't, perhaps they should. So, if you work for Deckers or, as is quite likely among IPKat readers, act for the company, take a moment to read Shireen's post here. It speaks volumes for the expectations of consumers regarding the way trade mark owners police and exploit their brands.

See eBay guide to fake Decker UGG boots here; Mumsnet on which UGGs are genuine here; Wikipedia article on UGG boots ("This article may require cleanup to meet Wikipedia's quality standards") here.