Monday miscellany

The IPKat has been a little disheartened in recent times by the constant stereotyping of the inventor as some sort of impractical, bumbling fool, redeemed from being an imbecile only by the kindness of the occasional author or the empathy of the reader. It was therefore with great pleasure that he left the Watford Palace Theatre after a performance of the popular seasonal pantomime Aladdin. This version, by Joanna Read and Stuart Thomas, featured Aladdin as an intelligent, articulate, relatively credible inventor, whose innovative ideas -- as much as his use of the genie of the lamp and a ring-fairy serving in a consultancy capacity -- enable the princess to be traced and rescued.  The Emperor actually says, "I'll be pleased to have an inventor as a son-in-law".  This Kat has no idea who these authors are but he feels that, apart from putting together a richly allusive libretto with enough cultural content to satisfy a three-generation audience, they could  do a more plausible job than some of our spin-doctors in placing inventors in a positive light.

Like a chameleon, Oxford University Press's monthly Journal of Intellectual Property Law & Practice (JIPLP) changes its colour from time to time, each year in fact.  The January 2011 issue, now available online to subscribers (full contents here), is a fetching and rather senatorial purple (illustrated left). Recommended features in this issue include J. Royce Fichtner and Troy J. Strader's "Automated takedown notices and their potential to generate liability under section 512(f) of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act", a delightful poke at Court of Justice jurisprudence from those delightful provocateurs Stephan Ott and Maximilian Schubert, "‘It's the Ad text, stupid’: cryptic answers won't establish legal certainty for online advertisers", plus a post-Christmas season special from the irresistible keyboard of Christopher Wadlow, "The professor, the patent, and the perilous life of the PHOSITA".

Hotel Cipriani: Venetian splendour
no further away than a mouse-click

The January 2011 issue of Sweet & Maxwell's monthly European Intellectual Property Review (EIPR) has now been published, ahead of schedule as usual. This issue contains plenty of material for the trade mark lawyer: Kevin Dugan (Lathrop & Gage LLP, New York) writes on the shared interest of trade mark law and the US Food and Drug Administration in avoiding medication errors -- an interest which, although shared, is approached in very different ways. Chris Wadlow elegantly unravels the mysteries of the Ciprianis and the relevance of international internet access to what was once imagined as business goodwill that came neatly packaged within national boundaries. Claire Howell tackles a bit of fusion with the point at which trade mark and registered design laws collide -- somewhere in the vicinity of LEGO brick and seductively shaped vacuum cleaners -- and the ever-young Charles Gielen plausibly argues today's popular heresy that the use of a Community trade mark in a single EU Member State no longer constitutes genuine use of that mark within the Community.

Another horse in the Sweet & Maxwell stable is the monthly series of law reports on European trade mark cases, containing handy headnotes as well as full English text.  This product is imaginatively and creatively entitled the European Trade Mark Reports (ETMR).  The January 2011 issue leads with the decision of Mr Justice Arnold in Och-Ziff (noted here by the IPKat) that a doctrine of "initial interest confusion", well-known and much discussed in the United States, could also be discerned in the case law of the Court of Justice of the European Union as well as in British case law. Other cases from Poland, Ireland and the Court of Justice (illustrated) are reported.

Famed for its French cuisine and its generous portions, the
Dorchester Hotel is seen here taking delivery of one of its
specialities of the house: the horse d'oeuvres

Having not yet received his January 2011 issue of Intellectual Property Magazine (IPM), IPKat team member Jeremy has been contentedly gazing at the beautiful photographs of happy winners of that publication's Annual Awards, at a ceremony to which he contributed by presenting one such award and eating a meal that was as tasty as it was substantial in the elegant surroundings of London's Dorchester Hotel.  There are some articles too,  of which the most interesting was a piece by Simmons & Simmons lawyers Rowan Freeland and Scott Parker (presumably on loan from West Ham United) which was a sort of obituary of the unpopular and much-resented European Commission investigation into the pharma industry.  Good news for Simmons supporters is that even if Rowan and Scott don't scoop one of IPM's 2011 Awards, Scott is already a contender for Footballer of the Year.