Wednesday whimsies

Trade marks in Europe: the future.  Last month's rapid response seminar, "The Future: next steps for trade marks in Europe: a  review of the long-awaited Study on the Overall Functioning of the European Trade Mark System", attracted a packed audience to the lovely City Point offices of law firm Simmons & Simmons.  IPKat team blogger Jeremy, who chaired the event on behalf of the MARQUES Class 46 weblog, is delighted to inform everyone that the video recording of the event is now available on the MARQUES website here, together with a note of the programme and speakers' details.

Details of this year's annual seminar run by The SPC Blog are now available. Since last year's seminar was adversely affected by the snow, this year's event is being held in June, when even England's famously inconstant climate is unlikely to deliver quantities of the dreaded white stuff. Details of the seminar may be found here.

There has been lots happening at the Office for Harmonisation in the Internal Market (OHIM) of late.  In case you missed it, (i) Today, for example, OHIM and the European Patent Office (EPO) have signed an important cooperation agreement (you can get the details here); (ii)  France has joined the TMview project, as the Kat reported yesterday here, and (iii) "significant progress" is reported here on two other cooperation projects related to common classification of terms in order to iron out some of those much-loved discrepancies which keep us all so amused.

End of an era.  Links & Law, the service produced by the incomparable Stephan Ott, has kept many of us informed and educated over the past few years.  Sadly, however, Stephan reports that he is to freeze the website.  He adds: "It will remain a useful resource to research search engine and hyperlink law, but for the time being there will be no more updates (except for the legal resources in English section)".  Good news is that Stephan will continue my research on search engine law (in the past seven years he has written more than 2,000 blog posts on the German Links & Law Blog and will continue posting there).  He has also written more than 50 articles for German law journals, most of them dealing with hyperlinks and search engines. Good luck, Stephan, we thank you for the past and wish you well for the future!


Peer to Patent.  The IPKat's forthcoming free seminar (6 June, kindly hosted by Olswang LLP) on the UK Intellectual Property Office's peer-to-patent experiment now has 38 registrants and the figure is creeping up very nicely thanks.  If you'd like to join us, you can find the details here.