Friday Fantasies

This Kat has been overwhelmed by not just the quantity of mail he has received in the past few days but also by its quality.  He hopes to get most if not all of this material on to this blog and its little cousins (listed in the side bar on the left of this weblog's home page), so please don't lose hope of reading about some of the truly exciting topics and breaking news that have surfaced of late.

Katnews 1: Annsley Merelle Ward is the latest Kat to undergo a career shift. Within the next few days she will be saying farewell to the Happy Hunting Ground of Holborn, waving goodbye to the Old Nick and packing her bags for One Bishop Square, where she will be celebrating the true joys and subtle mysteries of intellectual property litigation with global super-power Allen & Overy LLP.  Annsley is not just the AmeriKat: in the past few weeks she has established herself as a powerful writer and information-gatherer on Europe's precipitate haste to establish a new patent order. The Kats all wish Annsley well in her new position in which, they are sure, she will excel.

Anxiously scanning the latest
site-visit figures ...

Katnews 2: The IPKat is always fretting about whether anyone apart from a few family members, dedicated supporters and hard-boiled critics ever reads this weblog -- but he is comforted by the fact that, if the number of readers is low, the number of site visitors is comfortingly high. In January of this year a total of 116,098 visits were made to the IPKat's weblog. This is a new record for any month (the previous best, 96,531, being notched up in December; it's also the first time our tally of hits has exceeded the 100,000 mark. Week 4 of 2012 saw another record being broken, with 28,708 web visit. And yesterday, moments after guest Kat Darren posted his piece on the European Patent Office's somewhat pointless Catalogue of Differing Practices, we welcomed our 6,500th email subscriber. Merpel joins the IPKat and all of the crew in once again thanking all of their readers, friends and foes alike, for their continuing involvement, interest and (dare we say it) passion in reading, responding and debating IP topics from around the world. Without you, none of this would be worthwhile.

The builders of tomorrow's
world need work
experience today

Only one reader is needed to fulfil the dreams of a bright and interested 15 year old schoolboy from North West London who is seeking a work experience placement, either in a law firm or in the legal department of a company, between 2 and 13 July. No-one responded to this request on Monday and the IPKat is certain that this was because readers were probably thinking to themselves "since this weblog has so many readers, some else is bound to have offered him a place already so there's no point in me replying".  If you do have a space in your office and are prepared to share it with him, please email the IPKat here and let him know, with the subject line "Work Experience".

Bird & Bird. A discussion item on LinkedIn's Fashion+IP group caught the IPKat's eye. Following on from the recent demise of the Peacocks retail clothing chain, Rebecca Tilbury (Harrison Goddard Foote) posted Peacocks attracting multiple offers -- which is presumably why they have such pretty feathers in the first place. But birds have been in the news on the other side of the Atlantic too. Thus the IPKat was a little disconcerted by a discussion started on LinkedIn's Canadian Copyright & Trade-mark Law group by Started by Lorraine Fleck (Hoffer Adler LLP) with the alarming title Target apparel sued by Canada Goose over parkas.  This title surely calls for a good graphic or two ...