Monday miscellany

If you felt guilty about travelling to Brunei Darussalam for your holidays because of its longstanding failure to accede to the Paris Convention for the Protection of Industrial Property, fret no longer.  The Abode of Peace is, according to the World Intellectual Property Organization's Paris Notification No. 218, making its peace with Paris and signing up with effect from 17 February 2012. Three cheers, say the Kats in unison!

If your interest in orphans is not merely philanthropic but extends to copyright, you may wish to take a peep at the aftermath of the “Copyright & Commerce: Orphan Works and Fair Use in the Digital Age” event, hosted by the Copyright Clearance Center (CCC) last week. The event featured Maria A. Pallante (the 12th Register of Copyrights since the job was created in 1897), Cecilia Kang (National technology reporter for the Washington Post) and Victor Perlman (General Counsel, American Society of Media Photographers). This terrific trio talked of orphan works and even made themselves available to questions from denizens of the Twittersphere. The event is recorded for what nowadays passes for posterity here [Notes the IPKat, orphans can be very valuable copyright assets. Perhaps one of the best known is Bambi (left), brought up in a single parent family and whose mother was murdered while he was still an infant. Later adopted by a gentleman called Walt Disney, he rose to the top of his profession after his absentee father, a Prince, acknowledged his parentage].



Around the blogs. Kingsley Egbuonu's 27th post in his A to Z trawl of official IP websites for Afro-IP takes him to Liberia, where there aren't any. Ben Challis has revised and refreshed his valuable Music Law Updates, which now contains music and entertainment industry-related legal updates from 2002 to the present day -- some 2,000 articles in total -- which have been "painstakingly uploaded, categorised and tagged" in order to make it easier than ever to find topics of interest.  Copyright enthusiasts, particularly if they are Canadian and Jewish, will enjoy "Fair Dealing, Copyright and the Haggadah", which can be found here on the weblog of Canadian scholar Ariel Katz.  Connoisseurs of the point at which trade mark law meets obscenity will savour the decision of an OHIM Board of Appeal, written up for the MARQUES Class 46 blog by Benedetta Cordovado, on the refusal of an application to register a figurative mark containing the words F***ING FREEZING as a Community trade mark for, inter alia, leather goods. When Hell freezes over, and the point at which it does so, may be a matter of speculation, but it does seem that F***ING FREEZING was given a hotter reception than an earlier application to register as a Community trade mark a figurative sign containing the words F***ING HELL which, for beer and clothing, were found quite acceptable.

Are you Portuguese, medicinal and in need of a bit of dispute resolution? If so, here's some good news for you. There is a new Portuguese Law on disputes regarding reference medicines and generic medicines. The IPKat thanks his enthusiastic friend and fellow Class 46 blogger Pedro Malaquias for sending him a link to this piece on it. The Kat is asking Pedro to let him have a short note for the PatLit weblog on how this all affects the resolution of patent disputes in Portugual. When this is available, the Kat will let you know.