Monday miscellany

All the IPKat's friends are emailing him to tell him that Keisha Buchanan is to commence legal proceedings against the girl group she founded, the Sugababes, seeking to prevent the current line-up using the name. Sadly the report in The Mirror does not give full legal details of her claim, but the Kat suspects it may not be based on the enforcement of any registered trade mark rights. The word SUGABABES has not yet been secured as a Community trade mark, but an application to register it as a CTM was published just three weeks ago, the applicant being Keisha's erstwhile colleague, founder-member Mutya Buena. The IPKat wonders whether, after 12 years in business, the lovely ladies might be prosecuted for a false trade description if they continue to call themselves "Sugababes". Maybe the time has come to rebrand as Sugadames or Sugamatrons? Merpel, her interest in copyright matters having been recently stirred, notices that among the services for which application to register the SUGABABES mark has been made are, in Class 41 "providing digital music [not downloadable] from the Internet" ...


Meanwhile, this month's issue of the Journal of Intellectual Property Law and Practice, just published (details here) leads with an editorial mini-rant about who is to blame when a business rushes headlong into signing an IP-based transaction which turn out to be an invitation to litigate. Other features in this issue are articles by Takashi Miyazawa and Hiroshi Osada ("Quantitative indicators for evaluating the competitiveness of a patent") and Marianne Schaffner ("Two years on: the French experience of the enforcement directive"), as well as two separate analyses of whether the courts in England and Wales have become friendlier or more hostile to patents.

Here's a reminder about the IPKat's Intellectual Property Anthem competition, for which the first prize is complimentary admission to the forthcoming CLT conference on 10 May 2010 on "Ownership and Control of Intellectual Property". Details of the conference can be found here; details of the competition are here. The closing date for entries is 18 April, so you've still got some time ...