Wednesday whimsies

Around the weblogs. The 1709 Blog is running a series of '12 for 2012', these being 12 creators of copyright works who died in 1941 and whose works come out of copyright in 2012 in countries which operate a "life plus 70 years" term. The first four profiled creators are James Joyce, Andrew Barton ‘Banjo’ Paterson, ‘La Bolduc’ – Mary Rose-Anna Bolduc, née Travers -- and Isaak Babel. IP Tango's Patricia Covarrubia reports on the continuing IP filing boom in Brazil here.

A genuine Diophy?

The IPKat was alerted to this news item by a post by Charles Colman on the Fashion+IP LinkedIn Group on a new handbag battle which has reached as far as the blog pages of the Wall Street Journal.  In "Louis Vuitton Sues Warner Bros. Over ‘Hangover II’ Bag, Amazon App Causes Stir, FedEx Responds to Viral Video" [what an ungainly title!] by Robin Kawakami, it is reported that luxury litigator Louis Vuitton has filed suit against Warner Bros. in a New Court Federal Court, alleging that a handbag featured in the movie “The Hangover Part II” is a fake. Apparently a character in the movie carries a bag marked LVM and admonishes another character: “Careful, that is a Louis Vuitton.” -- but it isn't. According to The Hollywood Reporter, the bag may be a fake Louis Vuitton but it's a genuine Diophy, this being a Chinese-American company against which LV is already litigating.  Merpel innocently asks whether the description of a fake bag as a genuine one in the course of a movie could be made to fit within the definition of trade mark infringement which is currently employed in Europe: it doesn't seem to be in the course of trade ...

"WIPO Welcomes Australian Donation to Support IP Capacity-Building Projects" is the title of a recent media release from the World Intellectual Property Organization. The news behind the headlines is that Australia has donated 2 million Australian dollars for projects to help developing and least developing countries build capacity in the field of intellectual property (IP) and to ensure they are in a position to participate actively in the benefits of innovation and the knowledge economy. This is part of a 16 million Australian dollar contribution which Australia is making in order to help developing and least developed countries benefit through global trade. The IPKat says, he's sure it wouldn't cost as much as 2 million Aussie bucks to connect Africa's woefully unconnected national intellectual property websites to the internet, so that people can at least access the information they possess without having to go there in person or rely on slower, less reliable technologies. If you want an idea of the scale of the problem, read through Kingsley Egbuonu's weekly 'A to Z' tour of national intellectual property office websites on Afro-IP (he's up to L for Libya right now) and see how few of them are actually connected.

Issue 3 of Volume 8 of the excellent online journal scripted, which hails from the Centre for Research in Intellectual Property and Technology Law, based in the School of Law, University of Edinburgh, is now available for your perusal.  You can check out the contents here. This Kat's picks from this bunch are "Music and Dance: Beyond Copyright Text?", by Charlotte Waelde and Philip Schlesinger, and "Forgetting Footprints, Shunning Shadows. A Critical Analysis Of The “Right To Be Forgotten” In Big Data Practice" by Bert-Jaap Koops.  There's plenty more good stuff too!


ARUC and a hard place. ARUC is the Association for Resistance to Unfair Competition, the Ukrainian cell of the International League of Competition Law (LIDC). The Association is producing quite a reasonable English-language newsletter, which you can check out here. Not being an expert in Ukrainian matters, this Kat has always felt that this vast Eastern European state is not a naturally fertile soil in which the principles of competition can take root an sprout; he wishes the Association the best of luck in its ventures and hopes to hear more about it in due course.