Friday fantasies

As World Intellectual Property Day looms ever closer, the imperative to keep checking the IPKat's Forthcoming Events side bar grows more powerful too. Don't let the world celebrate this momentous occasion without you. And do check for the selection of conferences, seminars and other events that might, might change your life forever ...

The IPKat's friend Professor Ruth Soetendorp has uncovered something interesting. She reports that she purchased a pair of trousers recently in TKMaxx. The manufacturer was 'Lana' and the garment's swingtag bore the legend "copyright@designright". Comments Ruth:

"Obviously, there is some mystical quality attaching to those terms. The manufacturer appears to employ them in the expectation that their mere presence attached to his garments will put a protective shield around them".

If advice to Lana that the deployment of "copyright@designright" came from any lawyer who reads this weblog, will he or she please contact the IPKat urgently for a crash course in IP protection.


At the beginning of the month, the IPKat asked why the application of the German Bundesgerichtshof in Case C-34/10 Prof. Dr. Oliver Brüstle v Greenpeace e.V. -- the "what is an embryo?" case -- had not been posted on the Curia website. No answer was forthcoming, but the reference has finally been posted on that site today. The IPKat has just had another thought about the difficulties faced in tracking cases like Brüstle, and that is this: very properly Prof. Dr. Brüstle is accorded the dignity of his umlaut, since that is part and parcel of his name. It may even be an integral part of his identity as a German. However, as a concession to users of the Court of Justice's Curia website, would it not be possible for names that carry extra baggage in the form of umlauts, accents, cedillas and tildes to be searchable both with and without them? This would make it easier for people who are inexpert in the use of diacritical signs and for those, travelling abroad, who are confronted with an alien keyboard configuration, to access the information they need. There's a little poll in the IPKat's side bar, so you can tell the IPKat what you think.

If you're struggling to keep up with the torrent of intellectual property decisions and rulings from the European Union's Court of Justice and the General Court, good news from the Curia Diary is that the courts are on their spring holidays and won't be back in action till the week beginning Monday 12 April. Doubtless some of the judges will be giving serious thought during that period of quiet reflection to the plethora of unanswered questions that await them, and on which the value of our pension funds depends. For us lesser mortals [even those of us fortunate enough to have nine lives], that leaves plenty of time for us to catch up on our reading ...

Some naughty lawyers are so preoccupied with the question whether the hosting of AdWords and the advertisements which they summon up is a trade mark issue that they forget how important the availability of the E-Commerce hosting defence is in other areas of IP, in particular copyright. "How to be a good host -- lessons from AdWords" is the title of a neat little post on the 1709 Copyright Blog which takes a timely look at copyright/hosting.