Wednesday whimsies

Happy midweek, everyone! As the count-down to the weekend begins, the Kats remain busy enough, gathering up some choice offerings for you and trying their very best to come up with some fresh insights.


European trade mark organisation MARQUES is now tweeting. You can follow MARQUES on Twitter here.

To follow the progress of the Digital Economy Bill in the United Kingdom, all you have to do is click here. To follow the progress of the British Economy, click here.

Around the blogs. The IPKat has been perusing the busy pages of Securing Innovation, a handsomely-produced confection by ip.com. Its byline is 'Managing Intellectual Property, Patents, Trademarks, and Trade Secrets. Does it? You can decide. In case you missed it, The 1709 Blog has published the questions referred to the European Court of Justice by the Hoge Raad (the Dutch Supreme Court) last Friday on the impact of the Information Society Directive on 'fair compensation' and the 'three-step test' under private copying levies: you can read the questions, and the whole case (in English!) here.

"Who owns the invention, the University or the researcher?" is the title of neat piece of analysis of the recent Full Court of the Federal Court of Australia decision in University of Western Australia v Gray [2009] FCAFC 116 (3 September 2009). The author, Neil Brown QC, is an arbitrator and mediator in Melbourne, Australia. You can read the full text here.


The Penny Drops is the theme of this year's Convergence Survey, researched by London-based law firm Olswang LLP -- where IPKat team member Jeremy is IP consultant -- together with YouGov. According to the data, Apple iPhoners are among the heaviest users of digital content and are also more willing than other consumers to pay for a wide range of types of content. They are heavy users of services such as on-demand TV - not only on their phones but also on other devices, such as the main TV at home. They also demonstrated greater willingness to use micropayments and subscriptions to pay for access to a broad range of content. You can get the full report (all 96 pages of it, with loads of convergence data drawn from extensive interviews with large numbers of users) by just clicking here, or you can read a much shorter note on it on the 1709 Blog here.