Wednesday whimsies

The 64.2m CHF price-tag is a bargain -- it would
cost three times as much if it had a roof ...

While intellectual property is a concept best expressed in terms of intangibles, the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) is becoming increasingly tangible.  A recent media release, "Agreement with General Contractor Paves Way for Beginning of Conference Hall Construction", tells the story.  Work on WIPO's new Conference Hall will start later this summer and should be finished by mid-2013.  Member states earmarked 64.2 million Swiss Francs for this project, of which 24.2 million CHF will be covered from WIPO reserves, the remaining 40 million CHF coming from the extension of an existing commercial loan. The Kats refrain from making any comment, knowing that others do these things so much better, but something has occurred to them: Geneva must be crammed to the rafters with publicly funded conference halls and meeting facilities.  Would there be scope for some sort of sharing arrangement, given that most conference and meeting facilities are not being used at any given time.

Around the blogs. "If it ain't broke, don't fix it", is the powerful message sent by Keith Mallinson in the second of his punchy pieces on (F)RAND licensing, hosted on IP Finance here.  Congratulations to MARQUES's Class 46 weblog on European trade mark law and practice, which has yesterday clocked up its 2,000th email subscriber -- and while we're on the subject of Class 46, here's what it has to say about ICANN's long-awaited and much-feared final draft guidelines on the new generic top-level domains (gTLDs).  Suzy Schmitz's account of the tussle for control of the name "Dave" can be found here on the jiplp weblog. For those of a more philosophical bent, but with an eye for the real world too, here's IP Draughts' take on IP exchanges. Finally, there's more on costs awarded by the Patents County Court -- this time where there is no clear 'winner' -- in PatLit.


Event news.  Here's word of some interesting events past and future:

• "The Brand and Design Battleground" is a forthcoming CLT Conference, coming up in London on 4 July with IPKat team member Jeremy in the chair.  More will be said about this conference soon; in the meantime you can read the brochure and even sort out your registration here.
  
  
• The MARQUES "Future Plans" seminar held earlier this year in London, on the future of the European trade mark system at national and Community level following the Max Planck Institute's review, can now be viewed via the MARQUES website here.
  
  
• The UK cell of the AIPPI is holding its garden party in the Middle Temple Gardens, London, at 6pm on Wednesday 29 June. The £25 registration fee includes wine and all the IP people you can consume. Details here.

Reclaim the bagel. Is a bagel a term of art in respect of a specific delicacy, or is it a blanket term for anything that's made of dough, is round, has a hole in the middle and is tough to chew?  We may soon find out, if a recently-launched Reclaim the Bagel campaign gains momentum. "There are fake bagels appearing in shops across the country", states the campaign literature, adding "These imposters are rolls with holes and not the genuine, boiled and baked bagels we've all grown up with. The real bagel goes back generations to our great-grandparents and links us back to hundreds of years of Jewish culture. ... Bagels could be protected by EU law so that only real boiled and baked bagels can be called bagels. Write to the European Commission now and demand that they protect real bagels".  Interested readers can follow the campaign on Facebook and on Twitter at @reclaimthebagel.