Wednesday whimsies

The IPKat demonstrates
how high his pile of
unread emails is ...

If you have sent this Kat an email, please be patient! While Annsley has done a prodigious amount of blogging this week and last, all the Kats have been busy one way or another and this Kat has over 200 emails in his various email in-trays right now, threateningly pending and alarmingly unread. All correspondence will be answered eventually, though it may be a few days before the recent flood is dealt with. Please don't send follow-ups asking why you've not heard from me yet or checking if I'm ill because I haven't answered your email by return: I'm fine at the moment and, given the opportunity, I hope to remain that way.  Oh, and if you owe me money, please take this post as a final demand, complete with menaces ...

Suspensive detention of fakes [note to several of my correspondents: "fake" is not a shortened spelling of the word "generic"] is obviously a popular subject, given the very buoyant uptake for the seminar which the Journal of Intellectual Property Law & Practice (JIPLP) is organising, hosted so kindly by Olswang LLP in its London office, on 18 January.  Over 40 people have already signed up. You can still join them! Full details are available from the jiplp weblog here.

A preview of next year's spread,
as imagined by Merpel

Today's IP Publishers' and Editors' Lunch was great fun. This annual event, organised by the IPKat, was generously supported by Edward Elgar Publishing and by some very kind and thoughtful anonymous friends.  Star of the show was Wilhelm Warth (C. H. Beck), who destroyed the popular stereotypical myth that Germans have no sense of humour by delivering a keynote speech that was genuinely amusing and not a little provocative. While many English-speakers are happy to view the use of the English language in everyday legal practice, and increasingly in legal teaching and scholarship, as some sort of battle which has already been won, many would be uncomfortable to consider the prospect, which Wilhelm described, of being trapped within the linguistic limitations of a tongue which, some eminent scholars believe, is convenient for trade but ill-equipped to cope with the conceptual complexities of jurisprudential analysis [Merpel has always been in awe of those splendidly long words that have no convenient counterpart in English; the IPKat however wonders if there is any legal concept which is so abstruse, so remote from day-to-day experience, that it can't be expressed even in a simple language]. Anyway, the search for next year's venue and keynote speaker has already started -- but please don't email your suggestions till this Kat's communication congestion has been cleared up.

Around the blogs.  Eleonora Rosati has posted her maiden piece on the 1709 Blog, this being an account of the recent Court of Justice of the European Union ruling in Case C-145/10 Painer.  PatLit records its 44th PCC Page with some further complications of the proceedings between Cautious Co and IPOff in relation to the infringement of rights in a robot octopus.  Writing for IP Draughts, Mark Anderson reminds us that the EU's Technology Transfer Block Exemption expires in 2014 but that we've already got to start thinking about what to replace it with.  Art & Artifice has been busy these past days too: Simone Blakeney has just updated the great British public on the latest developments in the seemingly never-ending saga of artists' resale rights, hot on the heels of a post in which she asks some searching questions -- ripe for German scholars to answer -- concerning graffiti artists in Germany.

A distinguished reader who is a friend of the IPKat as well as being something of a celebrity, but who hasn't told him yet if she's happy to be named as the source of this item, has sent it to him from King's Cross, Sydney (the drugs and red light capital of Australia, it seems, though this Kat, having very poor powers of colour differentiation, wonders how he might spot a red light district if he's none too good at identifying red).  Anyway, the Kat's correspondent wonders:

"Is the Trademark Hotel for prostitutes with trade marks -- or for  IP lawyers or trade mark owners -- or all of the above?"

Merpel now thinks she understands what many of her friends from Latin America, in particular, mean when they talk about "notorious marks".