Friday Fantasies

Friday comes round again, and with it comes the prospect of a pleasant weekend break for those fortunate enough to be (i) gainfully employed and therefore not subjected to enforced unproductivity all week long or (ii) students revising for their summer exams, for whom any sort of break is likely to be accompanied by pangs of guilt for wasting time. Either way, make sure you check out the Forthcoming Events list on the IPKat's side bar -- that's a great aid to productivity if ever there was one!


Around the blogs. The IPKat's friend Adam Smith has sent him news that the World Trademark Review has now officially launched its blog, billed as "the first blog written by specialist IP journalists". You can find it here. Good luck, says the IPKat, who is sure that it will be good. Aaradhana Sadasivam's little story on SOLO IP, "Handling Difficult Clients", has attracted some interesting little tales of woe from that blog's readers. To see them, and indeed to add to them, click here. Another nine "what not to do" tips for authors hoping to publish articles and case notes on IP topics appear here on the jiplp blog. After the IP Finance weblog questioned whether bad corporate ratings for ethical issues like transparency can damage the value of a business's brands (here), Miri Frankel sent the IPKat this link to evidence suggesting that there's at least some correlation between a positive ethical rating and financial performance.


The IPKat's friend Abida Chaudri has just become Intellectual Property Consultant to the Museum of Brands, Advertising & Packaging, where she will help the Museum develop a more prominent role in the legal/IP sector and boost its IP learning resource. The Museum, based in London's Notting Hill, is a registered charity and is the world's only brand heritage venue, featuring over 12,000 original items from the Robert Opie collection. A "time tunnel" charts the fascinating evolution of many well-loved brands and consumer culture from Victorian times through to the present day. While she is still too young to qualify as an exhibit, Abida brings significant experience in the field, being a seasoned IP solicitor and trade mark attorney. You can contact her by email here.

Chelsea Football Club still has a love-hate affair with its former manager, The Special One -- as Jose Mourinho once described himself. The man who brought the team its Premier Championship successes only a few short years ago has now established himself with rivals Inter Milan, but Chelsea have the last laugh: the team holds the registrations of the JOSE MOURINHO trade mark for a wide variety of goods and services, according to this report in the Guardian. Thank you, Solvår Winnie Finnanger (Senior Legal Advisor, Norwegian Patent Office), not only for this but for a link to the letter of consent executed by Mourinho in favour of Chelsea on World Intellectual Property Day 2007, some five months before his dismissal.

In case you missed it, yesterday's online version of the Official Journal of the European Union brings the full text of Directive 2010/13/EU of the European Parliament and of the Council of 10 March 2010 on the coordination of certain provisions laid down by law, regulation or administrative action in Member States concerning the provision of audiovisual media services (Audiovisual Media Services Directive). It's a codification of the original Directive and its numerous amendments: you can access the new Directive here.

Almost as unmissable as the new version of the Audiovisual Media Services Directive is this newsy piece from The Hollywood Reporter, drawn to the Kats' attention by Mariola C. Kalinska (GreenLight Rights Clearance), on a lawsuit in which a New York District Court judge, trying a copyright and trade mark infringement action against the creator of a two-part pornographic remake of Frederico Fellini's classic movie "La Dolce Vita", has raised questions about whether anybody actually controls the legendary original. Curiously, not one but both parties disputed the chain of title to the original film which, the article explains, "the film was briefly in the public domain in the mid-1990s and may still be there today". The judge reminds the parties that the burden of proving the chain of title lies with the plaintiff who asserts it.