Friday fantasies

As ever, the onset of the fifth day of the standard Western working week marks triggers a frantic rush to check the IPKat's side bar for choice events. Good habits are the hallmarks of professional and commercial success -- and can there be any better habit to cultivate than that of regularly checking to see what's coming up?


Thank you, Margaret Llewelyn, for picking up two items that the Kats missed. The first, from the Guardian, is news of a bit of a foodie fight lining up as the London restaurant The Ivy appears about to take on an establishment of the same name, get-up, menu, which has been opened up in Miami. The second, with the Oscars looming, comes from the same impeccable source and is the story that a soldier is suing the makers of the award-nominated movie The Hurt Locker, on the grounds that the main character is based on him and thus they have stolen his intellectual property in his life story. To be continued, mewses the IPKat ...

If you are attending the International Trademark Association Meeting this May in Boston, mark your diaries. The IPKat has it on excellent authority that the informal Meet the Bloggers social event -- the highlight of the INTA week for many of us -- it to take place on Monday 24 May at 8pm (no finishing time is given) at Lucky's Lounge. No registration, no formalities, no entry fee, so just turn up. See you there?

Published today a year ago -- US patent 2009060666 [correction: granted patent 7,554,785], in which the applicant Boeing says:

"...Today's aircraft are being designed and built with greater percentages of composite material. For example, the Boeing 787 "Dreamliner" aircraft has more than 50% composites for its primary structure. Although composites are lighter and have better mechanical and fatigue properties than traditional aluminum, they are less electrically conductive, and have poor electromagnetic shielding, resulting in poor current dissipation when lightning strikes the aircraft. Compared to traditional aluminum, composites, in some circumstances, may be subject to greater damage due to lightning strikes.

When lightning hits an aircraft, a conductive path on its skin allows the electricity to travel along the skin, and then exit at some other location. Without an adequate conductive path, arcing and hot spots may occur. Arcing and hot spots have the potential to char, delaminate and/or penetrate the skin. In some circumstances, the charring, delamination, or skin penetration may reduce the load-bearing characteristics of the structure...."

Says the IPKat, echoing the thoughts of the kindly if anonymous supplier of this information, you might just want to reconsider flying a Dreamliner when thunderclouds are in sight.


Never a talented linguist, the IPKat depends on others to bail him out. He is therefore grateful to his friend and fellow blogger Sasha Yelnick for translating this item out of the original Russian for him:

"A letter, expressing the protests with regard to the proposed compulsory transfer of rights over the works created with the State's support into the public domain, was submitted to Dmitri Medvedev yesterday.

In December 2009 the General director of the Russian State Library and other various publishers claimed that the law (in force as of 1 January 2008), requiring a contractual agreement with every author prior to publishing or making his work available electronically and payment of royalties to that author, demonstrated the "outdated approaches of the industrial age". Furthermore, the sentence of 6 years imprisonment for those in breach was "too restricting" and was creating "insurmountable difficulties in developing the society".

To remove the above obstacles it was suggested to introduce a "free licence", allowing anyone to circulate various works. Moreover, the licence should be mandatory for any work created with the financial contribution of the Russian Government. Think of all the good old Soviet films, most of the films and series created in the last couple of decades ... All of them (and other future works created by TV companies and film studios) will be deprived of their intellectual property rights. The second proposal suggests that all the libraries should not merely have the right to make any book available in electronic format, but also to make them available on-line (whether for a fee or free).

The authors of the appeal, including the heads of the unions of cinematographers, writers, architects as well as the directors of well-known Russian film studios, insist that accepting the above proposals would have destructive consequences for the development of Russian culture, science and TV.

It should be noted that it is not the first time that the statutory rights of authors have been under attack. Some suggest that the lobbyists merely use the "incompetency of the State officials in the areas of IT and IP". It is interesting to see whether radical proposals of the sort will be made in relation to trade marks."

The IPKat thinks that he may not have heard the last of this ...