Monday miscellany

The IPKat's Turkish friend, Professor Mehmet Artemel, has been busily putting together a new website, IP in Turkey, which is full of useful legal information concerning the framework of intellectual property in that lovely country. This website is still to be regarded as "work in progress", but this Kat is sure that it will grow into a valuable resource for those of us whose interests are not parochial but cross national borders.  Incidentally, those who are unfamiliar with IP in Turkey will be pleased to discover how closely its laws mirror those of the European Union -- and how great are the efforts that have been made to provide a judicial system that offers real hope to IP owners that their legitimate interests will be taken care of.

Milton Jones is not a name that is greatly known to this Kat, whose sorties into the world of the radio tend to be confined to cricket test match commentaries. Since these go on for five days at a time, that doesn't leave much for radio humour.  Anyway, at the recommendation of a fellow feline, Jody Giesser, this Kat listened attentively to "Milton Jones: International Diplomat" (here).  Writes Jody: "While catching up on some serious news over on the BBC website, I somehow stumbled on this routine by Milton Jones. Now it's not too often that geographical designations become part of a comedy routine!" Indeed, it isn't -- and there may be a good reason why. Merpel's plot-spoiler: Ginster pasties and Chelsea buns ("Chelsea is heavily dependent on the bun industry") get a mention.

Around the weblogs.  On the 1709 Blog, Ben Challis asks "Why did Google have to launch its cloud service without licences?"  The eighth in Kingsley Egbuonu's A to Z series of official African IP websites, hosted on Afro-IP, visits Cape Verde.  For the SPC Blog, Herwig von Morze adds his own perplexity over the Advocate General's Opinion in Medeva to the puzzlement of others, while on IP Finance the Kat's old friend Christopher Pett warns that tobacco brand owners in Australia may be entitled to compensation if their brands are subjected to that country's 'plain packaging' plans. On the same issue, David Brennan's piece on the Fortnightly Review, "Could plain tobacco packaging laws ground a non-violation complaint under the Australia-US FTA?", repays reading.