Friday fantasies

"This little piggy went to market;
This little piggy stayed at home.
This little piggy ate roast beef;
This little piggy had none.
But this little piggy ... went off to check the IPKat's Forthcoming Events sidebar and now he has registered for all sorts of exciting conferences and seminars and is really excited to be going to them ..."

Be sure to check what's coming up! The autumn conference and seminar season is about to start, and there's bound to be plenty to entertain, educate and inform you! And, talking of forthcoming events, here are three conferences which are supported by the IPKat. In return for his support, the organisers have kindly agreed to offer a 10% discount on the registration fee to any reader of this weblog who quotes the special booking number which you can find in the side bar on the IPKat's front page, next to the conference to which it applies. The three events are

* IPR in China (22 and 23 November 2010)
* International Patent Litigation (6 and 7 December 2010)
* International Copyright Law (7 and 8 December 2010)

The UK's Intellectual Property Office is trawling for your views on another reference that has been made to the Court of Justice for a preliminary ruling: Case C-360/10 Belgische Vereniging van Auteurs, Componisten en Uitgevers (SABAM) v N.V. NETLOG.  This is the question which the Court has been asked to consider: 

"Do Directives 2001/29 and 2004/48, in conjunction with Directives 95/46, 2000/31 and 2002/58, construed in particular in the light of Articles 8 and 10 of the European Convention on the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms, permit Member States to authorise a national court, before which substantive proceedings have been brought and on the basis merely of a statutory provision stating that: "They [the national courts] may also issue an injunction against intermediaries whose services are used by a third party to infringe a copyright or related right", to order a hosting service provider to introduce, for all its customers, in abstracto and as a preventive measure, at its own cost and for an unlimited period, a system for filtering most of the information which is stored on its servers in order to identify on its servers electronic files containing musical, cinematographic or audio-visual work in respect of which SABAM claims to hold rights, and subsequently to block the exchange of such files?"

If you want to give the Office the benefit of your advice, you can email it here.  You'll have to be quick, though. The closing date for the receipt of comments is Tuesday 7 September.




Around the blogs. 

• The IPKat's friend Peter Bolam has asked him if he can recommend any blogs that are dedicated to film and media law. No such dedicated weblog springs into the Kat's mind, so he thought he'd ask his readers if they have any recommendations. If you can point to any, please let us all know by emailing the Kat here with the subject line "Filmmedia blog".
  
• "The shoes are original -- it's just the brands that are fake" is the title of a thoughtful and well-written IP Finance post by Miri Frankel that deserves a wider airing.  You can read it here.
• The thoroughly and unashamedly esoteric SPC Blog, which remarkably now has a cult following of over 860 email subscribers, was first off the blocks with this report on a little-known and probably destined to be little-read European Court of Justice decision concerning the extent to which accession states can tweak the single market concept for transitional purposes when deciding how to handle applications for supplementary protection certificates for pharma patents.
• The jiplp weblog's current list of articles in search of an author still has a few topics which have not so far been claimed.  If you're looking for a topic to write on, check it out.

Last-minute registrants for next Tuesday's "How to Write an Effective IP Press Release" IPKat seminar (details here) should email IPKat team member Jeremy directly here.