Wednesday whimsies

It is with great personal sadness that this Kat records the death last week of his old friend Jean-Leon Pire, following a long and dreadful battle against cancer. Jean, originally with Gevers and later with its sister company Valipat, was a larger-than-life personality who frequented USTA/INTA, MARQUES and other international conferences which provided a natural platform for his great enthusiasms -- whether for the Community trade mark, .eu domains, CompuMark, Edital or anything else.

Sadly Jean never lived to see the birth of the grand-daughter whose arrival he so keenly awaited.  Condolences are offered to all Jean's family and particularly to his wife Christiane, to whom he was devoted and for whose own return to health we pray.

Around the blogs 1. When our former colleague Tufty (left), true to his master's passion for patent technicalia, decided to become a Divisional Kat by setting up his own weblog, we remaining Kats all wished him luck and have remained on amicable terms ever since.  Being IP fans, we even cast the occasional eye across his writings. We're therefore pleased to draw the attention of our readers to Tufty's recent post on "Rigcool v Optima Solutions - some confusion over dates", which has nothing at all to do with the fruit this Kat confuses with figs -- but a lot to do with periods of time. Asks Tufty:

"How do you calculate a "period of two years beginning with the date of grant"? Does this period include the anniversary date of the date of grant or not? This was the essence of the recent case of Rigcool Limited v Optima Solutions Limited, which resulted in a pair of decisions issued on 5 May (BL O/149/11) and 1 June 2011 (BL O/182/11). Following these decisions, the period may well not be what you previously thought it was. This could have rather interesting (if not worrying) consequences for other periods specified in the UK Patents Act and Rules".

Moving from patents to trade marks, the IPKat has learned that his friend Erwin Haüer, a founding father of the esteemed Dutch boek9.nl IP blog in The Netherlands, is also doing a bit of a Tufty and setting up his own blog: Markmatters.com.  Erwin describes this trade mark blog as "light and essential, fun and relevant, passionate with a legal view and a Dutch twist", all of which reminds him of a night out in his days as a kitten, except that he never managed to dance the Dutch twist. The blog appears to be connected with Dutch IP practice Knijff Trademark Attorneys, but it's none the worse for that! 

 Around the blogs 2. There's amother excellent post on IP Draughts, "Getting your IP contract reviewed by an overseas lawyer" -- a subject that some folk are a little squeamish about.  The increasingly ambitious Kenya Copyright Board isn't squeamish either, when it comes to grasping the social media: the Board has now started its own blog, copyfightkenya (c),  which links to the Board's Twitter presence. Merpel's most impressed -- she can't think of any other words that have the sequence of letters g-h-t-k in the middle of them.  The MARQUES Class 46 weblog triumphantly reports on the work of the MARQUES Geographical Indications Team, which has produced an impressive collection of tables and data links to sources of information on GI in Europe and beyond.



A mystery: with whom is Sherlock
Holmes playing table tennis?



Around the blogs 3. IP Finance features the latest UK Treasury thoughts about the Patent Box and an initiative by Kat blogger Jeremy's colleagues at Olswang LLP to compose a response to the latest proposals.  The SPC  Blog is soliciting opinions, from Europe and indeed anywhere else, of the Advocate General's still-untranslated Opinion in Case C-125/10 Merck, the Case of the Zero Term Extensions [sounds like a Sherlock Holmes novel, quips Merpel]. SOLO IP touches on the delicate topic of closing a practice. Finally the jiplp weblog, breaking with the habit of a lifetime, carries a note on a case which is not on IP at all, but which is highly relevant to IP litigation: it deals with the issue of disclosure/discovery when a litigant, having received a report from one expert, decides he wants to change to another one. Can he keep the first report hushed up?

Press 1 for real fakes, 2 for replicas,
3 for unauthorised gray goods ...

Brand-i and the Report-a-Fake Button. On Monday the IPKat reported on the Brand-i initiative for promoting guaranteed non-fake businesses and its 'Report a Site' button. In doing so, he speculated as to how often anyone presses the button and what happens thereafter. Brand-i director Jenny Dalton has now kindly provided the answers:

" ... we have already had in excess of 150 reports of illegal/counterfeit sites. As far as we are aware all the sites are 'genuinely' counterfeit. These reports are passed on directly to the brands' IP teams, who we work closely with, so that they can action take-downs or the relevant legal steps. Many of these reports have already been acted on - after less than a week of Brand-i being live - and we hope that these kinds of numbers will continue. Of course it is all about bringing these new initiatives to the public's attention so we thank you again for the mention".

Thanks, Jenny, for letting us all know!