Monday miscellany

Message from AmeriKat - Mark your Unitary Patent Calendars! The AmeriKat tells the IPKat that, following the incomplete evidence session of Baroness Wilcox before the House of Commons Scrutiny Committee, the Committee has requested her presence once more on 7 March 2012 at 2:30 PM.  Readers will recall from the AmeriKat's reports that the session became quite tense, so the AmeriKat is intrigued to see whether a different direction will be taken by the Minister and/or Committee. This session follows this weekend's first meeting of the Committee on the Rules of Procedure, so the AmeriKat is understood to be quite giddy at the updates that the Minister may have for Committee.  According to the press release, transcripts of those sessions are available online at the Committee's homepage. If you go to the Committee's homepage, you will discover the existence of further letters and submissions made by the IP Bar, the Chartered Institute of Patent Attorneys (CIPA), the Intellectual Property Federation (IPFed) [Picking up where the AmeriKat has left off, Merpel has spotted something very interesting: a contrary position on the much-criticised Articles 6 to 8 has been taken by Dr Winfried Tilmann, in a submission which he has made on behalf of leading international intellectual property practice Hogan Lovells International LLP.  Is this, Merpel wonders, the first formal submission in support of Articles 6 yo 8 to have been made by a law firm? Even more interesting is the fact that Dr Tilmann is a member of the Rules of Procedure Committee].

Whatever happened to Japan?  Back in the 1980s and early 1990s, it seemed that Japan was the unstoppable economic and high-tech force among free market economies. A leading manufacturer, innovator and designer of goods and a trend-setter in many other ways too, Japan was the country we all admired, respected, feared and envied.  Then suddenly the malaise of economic stagnation and the rise of China brought a slowdown within Japan itself and a sudden focus on its massive neighbour. But Japan has never ceased to be creative, in industrial terms, in artistic creativity and in legal matters too. Accordingly the forthcoming seminar, "Recent Developments in Japanese Copyright Law - Exceptions and Limitations", may be worth attending.  This event is jointly organised by the Queen Mary Department of Law, the Centre for Commercial Law Studies and Meiji University on the afternoon/evening of 21 March. The venue is the London office of Edwards Wildman Palmer UK LLP in the City. Click here for further details.

Around the weblogs.  Kinglsey Egbuonu's A to Z trek around official African intellectual property office websites on behalf of the Afro-IP weblog takes him to Niger. The jiplp weblog has two items for your consideration this morning. The first is what on earth we should do about footnotes full of lengthy URLs; the second, with the poetical title "The Pirate Bay: sunk without a say?", is a note on the very recent ruling of the Chancery Division, England and Wales, on an application for an order that ISPs block access to The Pirate Bay (neither the ISPs nor TPB being in court). Darren is writing a big note on this decision once it has been back to court in June: this is the hors d'oeuvres.  Mark Anderson, on IP Draughts, develops a topic that has long been close to this Kat's heart: the dangers of using a US template for a contract that is not premised on US law and practice. Rosie Burbidge has posted two short notes on Art & Artifice, here and here, summarising last week's Red Bus copyright seminar.

Perpetual protection for non-perishable sausage. Being linguistically challenged and being subject to certain dietary restrictions, this Kat cannot say whether "Gornooryahovski Sudzhuk" is pronounceable, or indeed edible -- but this traditional flat sausage from the northern town of Gorna Oryahovitsa has become the first Bulgarian geographical indication to be recorded in the European Union’s register of protected designations of origin and protected geographical indications.  This event took place on 21 December 2011, but the IPKat has only just heard about it. He congratulates his Bulgarian brothers on this notable first and welcomes Gornooryahovski Sudzhuk ("a compacted, non-perishable, raw, dried sausage manufactured from natural gut filled with machine-minced beef") into the ever-growing family of protected European sausages. A katpat goes to his friends at Petosevic for supplying this information.

Enough to make you cry!
the whole Cour de Cassation
judgment is only 5 sides long,
including the empty space ...

Short and sweet.  Late last week, the IPKat received a brief email from Professor Sir Robin Jacob, with this attachment. On close and careful inspection, it was apparent that the latter was in French.  The exchange of correspondence ran thus:

Sir Robin: "You should put this out on IPKat"
IPKat: "Sorry, just got down to this and it’s all in French. Give me a clue and I’ll post it".
Sir Robin: "Its in French because they are French".

From this exchange the IPKat assumed that the case must have had something to do with obviousness. He was wrong. It seems that this is a decision of the Cour de Cassation, the source of some of the shortest appellate rulings that this Kat has ever seen. The gist of it is that the court has in effect agreed with the British rule in Unilin that res judicata in one case trumps later revocation [i.e. that if you infringe a patent which turns out never to have been valid and are made to pay damages, that's just your hard luck]. The Unilin point, as Sir Robin notes, is going to be challenged in the British Supreme Court in the Virgin Atlantic appeal [for discussion of this issue, see PatLit here and here].