Today IPKat team member Jeremy trekked out to the furthest reaches of Windsor, to the Land of Lego, where the new UK Minister for Intellectual Property, Baroness Wilcox (right), presented awards to a collection of sweet, well-behaved and creative children -- winners of this year's World of Cracking Ideas competition. Some 9,000 youngsters from across the nation took time off from whatever it is that youngsters do these days (sending messages in textese, file-sharing and daubing each other's Facebook walls?) to offer their ideas. 
Today's event, the culmination of a joint venture between the Intellectual Property Office and Wallace and Gromit creators Aardman Animations, took place in St Leonard's Mansion, Legoland, an edifice that was built in order to test the proposition that humans could live without oxygen and air conditioning for up to 90 minutes. It was all rather lovely. The IPKat hopes that initiatives like this will survive the impending round of public sector spending cuts, if only for the sake of the happiness they give to a roomful of proud parents ...
Left: cunningly disguised as an dog, an IPO civil servant manages to gate-crash Legoland for the day
The range of ideas on offer was broad. Most would not even come close to fulfilling the criteria of patentability, but that wasn't the point. The objective of the exercise was twofold: to encourage children to play an active role in thinking up ideas rather than being no more than passive consumers of the ideas of others, and to recognise the whole point of IP: just as a bicycle that wasn't locked or protected when left unguarded might be taken away, so too might the unique content of their own creative thought, if not secured by an IP right where appropriate and available.
Right: cunningly disguised as a man looking for his errant dog, an IPO civil servant manages to gate-crash Legoland for the day
IPO press release on the winners here
Aardman here
The Wrong Trousers here
The Wrong Wallis here
Cracking Ideas and a day to remember
Reviewed by Jeremy
on
Wednesday, July 07, 2010
Rating:
Reviewed by Jeremy
on
Wednesday, July 07, 2010
Rating:
Follow the IPKat on LinkedIn 
![[Guest post] EUIPO Second Board of Appeal refers case to Grand Board of Appeal following earlier refusal to register a photograph of a man’s head/face as an EU trade mark](https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiUj9v-k3DYaSVMR4lsmKDLHVB5nIoINuvZNbH2TQCelrfaAE9qmGSAQs-plzQ7HnZ7Svk_gRdrIODp0Nat5vpWajduit3xkArNhK76AHhX770RIJ62thfCVI5fnvcXU-5zH4NkUSfPY9FjRMFiK7OKJ7m7YSo2FzhyPSoA8ZWCsxaOXb0bBCoPQA/s72-c/Picture%201.png)
![[Guest post] Benelux Office rules on opposition proceedings prepared by ChatGPT](https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi29VY0rNNP1Hqyz8RgB47r4q7fhqQfYHxsEbX_RKmT4KU5Y_vg7vB6dsAW91CidjMfJ38klTvD4mMtZb3QmwFPAHaGF88BPttWSbfYvo7UUg7MpFRTNtEjThmG0QaX2qZFFHSnN71i3YQZSBFC0SL7PgkAlme-XH8cSNWRFbOAOuLr_LMOGcImLQ/s72-c/Screenshot%202024-12-04%20at%2020.45.58.png)
Posts
No comments:
All comments must be moderated by a member of the IPKat team before they appear on the blog. Comments will not be allowed if the contravene the IPKat policy that readers' comments should not be obscene or defamatory; they should not consist of ad hominem attacks on members of the blog team or other comment-posters and they should make a constructive contribution to the discussion of the post on which they purport to comment.
It is also the IPKat policy that comments should not be made completely anonymously, and users should use a consistent name or pseudonym (which should not itself be defamatory or obscene, or that of another real person), either in the "identity" field, or at the beginning of the comment. Current practice is to, however, allow a limited number of comments that contravene this policy, provided that the comment has a high degree of relevance and the comment chain does not become too difficult to follow.
Learn more here: http://ipkitten.blogspot.com/p/want-to-complain.html