Friday fantasies

It's Friday again, time to reflect not on what might have been but on what hasn't yet been.  The best way to do this is by checking the IPKat's Forthcoming Events list, which you can conveniently access here. 

Kat rant.  Earlier this week an extremely annoying person sent the IPKat a letter, purporting to be from someone else, which this blog published in good faith on the assumption that it was genuine.  The author of the letter should be ashamed of himself.  No-one minds a little harmless fun, or even a little controversy -- but it is quite beyond the bounds of acceptability to submit for publication a piece which, the author knows, may affect the professional standing and the integrity of another member of the IP community.  As it is, the letter in question not only caused a lot of embarrassment and upset but has also wasted a good deal of the IPKat's own time.  The IPKat receives a large volume of post and cannot be expected to verify the identity and the bona fides of every correspondent.  He respects and trusts his readers as his friends and as part of an extended IP community which covers most countries in the world -- and in return he expects to receive the respect and trust of the rest of that community.  For now he proposes to take no further steps (though he has a shortlist of suspected perpetrators), but he feels that the very least that the author of the hoax letter can do is to write and apologise to the person whose good name and reputation he was so callously prepared to toy with for the sake of making a pathetic political point.

Around the blogs.  The IPKat's friend and regular JIPLP author Paul England (Simmons & Simmons) wrote a jolly good note for PatLit on the Solvay reference to the Court of Justice on cross-border injunctive relief for patent infringements in Europe (details in English are still a bit hard to come by).  The 1709 Copyright Blog has now posted two lots of entries (here and here) in response to the challenge to complete the sentence "If music be the food of love, then copyright is ..."  Afro-IP has made some progress in its quest to discover the real story behind the commercialisation of Ethiopia's coffee brands, here.

Do not disturb: parliamentary
draftsman at work

It's not often that the IPKat publishes a comment posted on one of his items as a separate feature in its own right, but this anonymous contribution was too good not to share. Yesterday the Kat commented on Shanks v Unilever, a decision on the meaning of a somewhat obscure passage of statute law relating to the entitlement of an employee inventor to receive compensation where his invention has conferred an outstanding benefit on his employer. An anonymous correspondent commented that he had trouble understanding the case: could someone please summarise it for him? Before the IPKat could lift paw to pen, another correspondent posted this:

"On a brief reading, the decision is about deciding whether you should consider the earnings of an actual person or the earnings of a hypothetical person, whether the past earnings you should consider are the actual earnings the actual person actually made, the hypothetical earnings the actual person didn't actually make, or the hypothetical earnings a hypothetical person could actually have made, and whether the hypothetical future earnings you should consider should be the actual earnings the actual person will actually make hypothetically based on the actual earnings they did actually make, the actual earnings the actual person could hypothetically make hypothetically based on the hypothetical earnings they didn't actually make, the hypothetical earnings the actual person could hypothetically make based on the actual earnings they actually made, the hypothetical earnings the actual person could hypothetically have made based on the hypothetical earnings they didn't actually make, or the hypothetical earnings the hypothetical person could hypothetically have made hypothetically based on the hypothetical earnings they could actually have made".

Couldn't have put it better myself, purrs the puss.

The Harrods 'Supreme':
a snip at £1,250

Coming soon.  British IP practitioners who are in search of some pre-Christmas IPReg CPD points may need reminding of an attractive little event on 15 December, run by London IP and held at the magnificent headquarters of the Chartered Institute of Patent Attorneys.  Further details of this reasonably-priced get-together (£50 + VAT) are available on SOLO IP here. Says the IPKat, compared with the price of a Harrods Christmas hamper (here), you can see what a bargain this event actually is!


Survey response.  The IPKat's survey question ("The subtle art of comparison: your chance to vote", posted here), has at the time of drafting this round-up attracted nearly 600 votes together with nearly 30 comments, some of which are most perceptive.  This vastly exceeds the response level for any previously-posted poll. There are still four days till the poll closes, following which the IPKat will explain in more depth why it is that he asked whether the two signs in question were likely to be confused with one another.