Monday miscellany

The closing date for the IPKat's Anagrams competition, for which the prize was complimentary admission to next week's "Copying Without Infringing" conference on Wednesday 17 November, was 31 October. The Kat was roaming far from home on that date but most of the competition entries were safely tucked away on his desktop at home, where he couldn't access them.  He's back in harness now and can bring you news of the winner. The challenge was to find a decent anagram of the phrase "fair dealing for the purposes of private study", which appears in the UK's Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. This was actually very difficult, as many of the entrants pointed out.  Some felt obliged to resort to Americanisms (permitted), the dramatic use of punctuation (tolerated), textese (forbidden) and made-up words (yes, all words are made up, but some are more made up than others ...) in order to make sense or at least use up surplus letters.  Anyway, these best entrants were as follows:

Sometimes composing anagrams
requires superhuman powers 

Eddie Cameron
Le droit d'auteur - gave fine profits for SS Happy
Felis catus cat-ches the latest scandal on film

Graham Titley
Staff lippy! Denies furtive repro, goads author
author flaps, furtive repro defy deposit gains

Ross Allan
Pirate’s” virtuous, sporty, offhanded pilferage
IP out of step” purrs dashingly feared favorite
IP Profiteer: “hot stuff ravenously disparaged”

Ben Clossick Thomson (Arnold & Porter)
List of Harry Potter parodies: Envisage duff up.
I avail a defender of property rights. Fuss. Pout.

Andrew Clemson (Cleveland)
A fat feline’s rights payout deprives dour Prof.

Mary Smillie (Bird & Bird)
If IP students prepare for study - go have or fail !

and the winner is ... Jim Pearson (Abel & Imray)
Hay! It is a purported defense to vulgar rip-offs

"Music's all very well", said
Kitty, "but you can't beat
whipped cream ..."

If you're not Lucky Jim you can still attend the conference: full programme details are available here.   And if you fancy another competition, there's still more than a week to go till the 17 November deadline for the "Food of Love" competition.  This is tied to the "Music and Intellectual Property" conference which takes place on Wednesday 8 December (you can see the full programme here). The competition, for which the prize is complimentary admission to the conference, goes like this: Shakespeare's play Twelfth Night opens with Duke Orsino saying

"If music be the food of love, play on,
Give me excess of it".

Your task is to complete the following sentence: "If music be the food of love, then copyright is ..."  Entry details can be found here.  Judging by the large number of high quality entries so far, this is a lot easier than creating anagrams.

This weblog has a number of readers from Slovakia, but the Kat doesn't know which bits of intellectual property they are most interested in.  He does have a reader who writes:

We would like to get a little more of a feel for trade mark enforcement and protection in Slovakia. In particular, how common is trade mark infringement litigation (as opposed to oppositions) and who the firms are that have acted in recent leading cases (if indeed there have been any)?  Does anyone know how we might collect this information?

If anyone has any useful information, can he or she please post it below as a comment or, if it is too sensitive, please email it to the IPKat who will pass it on.


Around the blogs.  The 1709 Blog, which focuses on all sorts of copyright issues, has just reached the 700 mark for email subscribers.  Afro-IP, which as its name suggests covers intellectual property issues up and down the vast continent of Africa, now has a searchable database of exactly 900 blogposts.  The PatLit patent litigation and dispute resolution blog continues to look for prospective contributors -- whether regular or occasional -- who have good experience of the subject, plenty to say and a decent level of literacy. So too does IP Finance.  If you're interested, email Jeremy here and give him details of your credentials as a prospective blogger.