Monday miscellany

A very excited message from British Black Music's Kwaku reached the IPKat this weekend to say that the UK's brand new Intellectual Property Minister Baroness Wilcox will attend tomorrow's Talking Copyright seminar (links and details here). What can you expect? "Panellists including David Stopps (MMF UK & International copyright & related rights director), Pauline Henry (ex-Chimes singer/IP consultant), Dave Laing (researcher/lecturer), Ben Challis (lawyer/lecturer and 1709 Blogger), and Kwaku (BMC founder/lecturer) lead an irreverent yet factually-rich discussion covering various angles - history, landmark cases, causes célèbre, 'good' and 'bad' copyright stories/policies, etc in association with University of Westminster’s Centre For Black Music Research". Sounds like fun! It's also free, but pre-booking is necessary.

Also fun, particularly for Australians who may wish to have something to celebrate after their Night of Tears in South Africa, is news that the peer review phase of the inaugural Peer-to-Patent Australia pilot project is now complete. This web-based initiative is aimed at supporting patent examination and improving the quality of issued patents in Australia by preventing the grant of patents that do not satisfy the statutory requirements of novelty and inventiveness. The project aims to do this by allowing members of the public to put forward prior art references to be considered by IP Australia's patent examiners during patent examination. A total of 31 pending patent applications were reviewed by the community of peer reviewers during the six-month peer review phase, which generated 106 prior art references in response to those applications. These prior art references will now be forwarded to IP Australia to be considered by the patent office in examination. The results of this pilot project will be published online in an anniversary report in December 2010. The Kats wait excitedly for the next step.

A curious friend of the IPKat writes to ask:

"I was wondering what people's experiences have been when acting for claimants asserting unregistered trade mark rights under the Uniform Domain-Name Resolution Policy (UDRP). If you have acted for such a claimant, I would be interested to know whether your client was a large company/celebrity/big-brand, what the success rate has been, and whether you provided a large volume of evidence in order to satisfy this element?"

If you have any comments, do please post them below.