Wednesday whimsies

Around the blogs.  If you really enjoy a complex web of legal, contractual and cultural interrelation, try "Ownership and renewal rights in Bob Marley's albums" by Eddy Ventose, a current intelligence note shortly to be published in JIPLP but made available to all via the journal's jiplp weblog (here).  Meanwhile PatLit has now published the sixth in its weekly series of PCC Pages on the revamped Patents County Court for England and Wales (here).  Now here's something to celebrate: Afro-IP, the only weblog to focus entirely on African intellectual property matters, has two causes for celebration. Earlier this week it posted its 900th blog entry, and now it has just notched up its 500th email subscriber. You can read the recent post, which asks some challenging questions about Ethiopian coffee branding, here.

New blog on the block?  The IPKat's not sure how long Sacndinavian IP agency Awapatent's AWA IP Blog has been around, and it may not even be that new -- but it's new to him, which is the main thing.  It's posting around one item a month at the moment which, many folk tell the Kat, is about as much extra reading as they can cope with.

Apologies are due for a dreadful oversight.  When the IPKat gave his blessing to the forthcoming Intellectual Property Law Developments Conference 2011 (date 24 January, details here) he quite forgot to tell the organisers of his aversion to cliched lightbulb symbolism -- so don't be surprised to see a sawn-off lightbulb image on the front page of the brochure.  Better news is that IPKat team member Jeremy is chairing a wonderful cast of speakers which includes fellow Kat Matt Fisher, IPO Chief Economist Tony Clayton, leading IP bloggers David Musker (Class 99) and Hugo Cox (1709 Blog), JIPLP contributors Darren Meale, Nigel Parker and Ben Allgrove, plus longstanding IP gurus Trevor Cook and John Hull, and let's not forget Aaron Wood and Mark Ridgway either.  There will be a competition. Details to follow.

... here's an unrelated EIP: a therapy
practice based in Brooklyn, NY

A zappy, snappy press release from UK-based patent and trade mark practice EIP informs the IPKat that it is celebrating its tenth anniversary this week by launching six new practice groups. Nothing exciting about that, you might say -- but these groups have been treated to a bit of branding of their own: EIP Digital, EIP Life, EIP Green, EIP Brands, EIP Search and EIP Strategy. A neat, simple exercise, this technique retains the firm's name as the house brand and separates out each strand of practice with a short, memorable label. What a pleasant change from some of the turgid, descriptive labels that some firms use.  Merpel adds, it would be great if the Office for Harmonisation in the Internal Market were to do the same: OHIM Grant, OHIM Oppose, OHIM Appeal, OHIM Cancel ...

Bad news for all lovers of long-running disputes. It seems that Apple and Apple have finally patched up a quarrel which began in 1978, when convergence was hardly even a twinkle in the technologist's eye. In the days when computers couldn't do much more than arithmetic and word-processing, and sound recordings were sold in shops, who would have imagined that computers could handle music too? Anyway, Beatles recordings will at last be available from Apple iTunes.