Friday fantasies

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Taking a running jump. Following this week's Fakes in Transit seminar (the PowerPoints for which are available here), the IPKat has received from Edward Humphrey-Evans a link to a YouTube video of what happened to some goods -- skyrunners-- seized by customs at his behest.  He explains that the goods in question are protected in the UK by EP1196220, with the euphemistic title “Device for helping a person to walk”.  His client decided that it wanted the goods destroyed, since the infringers did not have any further money to transport the goods back to China/elsewhere).  The goods were sent to Germany, where they were destroyed by a Caterpillar tracked vehicle.  The IPKat is fascinated by these devices but is a little miffed at the fact that, as a quadruped, he has to buy two sets.

Not on this year's reading list --
but there are changes to come

Real-life drama: a reader's struggle. "I struggled to locate the PDFs containing the collated country annexes that the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) allegedly produces each year for printing before the EQE [the much-feared European Qualifying Examination for European patent attorneys] and so I called them up. WIPO was very helpful [Katnote: this is a true story] and led to me to this page where the PDFs have been up since last week. I thought that EQE candidates might find this information useful".  A big kat-pat goes to Christine Walmsley-Scott (Technical Assistant, Marks & Clerk (Luxembourg) LLP) for letting us all know.

Drink, drugs and Detroit.  A kat-pat goes to the ever-informative Chris Torrero for spotting that the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) has struck a deal to take a lease on a 31,000 square foot of office space in premises which, coincidentally formerly housed Parke-Davis Laboratories and Stroh’s Brewery in Detroit. The IPKat wonders whether there might be a bit of spare room in the building for some of the European Union's patent establishment. That would swiftly end any further squabbling as to where in Europe the trade bloc's IP institutions should be housed.

An earlier proposal for sharing
out IP litigation was based on
the principle of rotation ...

Assignment of IP litigation: even the courts do it.  IP litigation in Spain has recently become, at least in theory, a more specialist and highly-focused activity. Since 2003, the country's Commercial Courts have been the exclusive venue for commercial litigation -- including IP, unfair competition, advertising, bankruptcy and antitrust disputes. Presiding judges had to pass specific examinations in these subjects, but that was not enough.  Following an internal agreement among the Commercial Courts of Barcelona of 23 November 2011 (recently approved by the Spanish Ministry of Justice), the ten current Commercial Courts of Barcelona have agreed to assign all their patent litigation to Commercial Courts 1, 4 and 5, while trade mark and design cases will be solely heard by Commercial Courts 2 and 8 (a kat-pat goes to Ignacio Marqués Jarque, Baker & McKenzie Barcelona, S.L.P., for kindly supplying this information)

The Megaupload logo:
pause for reflection ...

Around the blogs.  Congratulations to the 1709 Blog, which specialises in copyright, on welcoming its 1,100th email subscriber.  The event that brought this up was surely Ben Challis's piece on the arrest of the Megaupload team in New Zealand, which you can read here.  Darren Olivier has posted this fun pic on Afro-IP -- fun, unless you are involved with KIA or NOKIA, that is.  For those folk who wonder what, in real terms, Court of Justice rulings on patent term extension in Europe actually mean, Netherlands patent examiner Martijn de Lange has extrapolated some actual data as to the one-SPC-per-patent concept as it affects patents in his office. Finally, the IP Finance blog features the departure of adidas as kit sponsor for Liverpool Football Club and ponders over collateral damage which the adidas brand may suffer.