Friday fantasies I

The Kats welcome Wolfe.  The IPKat and his colleagues congratulate Catherine Wolfe (Boult Wade Tennant) on her inauguration as President of the Institute of Trade Mark Attorneys (ITMA) and wish her every success.  Yesterday's ITMA press release set out her goals, which all look highly commendable. There was however one thing that caught this Kat's eye and rather troubled him. According to the text:

”ITMA and CIPA are working together to put a programme in place for ‘non-core skills’. These are everything an IP attorney needs in the job apart from IP work itself. Things like confidentiality, ethics, quality management, employment law, company law and records management, so that we can all be the best employers and employees and firms.”

Confidentiality and ethics might be "non-core" in so far as they aren't "IP work", but he thinks they are at least as core to the activities of IP practitioners as meeting office deadlines, drafting applications and all the nitty gritty stuff. Can a better term than "non-core" be found? Something like "absolutely essential and don't even think of entering the profession unless you can handle this", perhaps?

On the subject of ethics, there's good news for practitioners of espionage -- if they happen to be in the United States, that is.  If you download thousands of lines of source code  from your employer's computer system, you can't be convicted of theft under the National Stolen Property Act since the source code, being intangible, isn't "property" that is capable of being stolen: you can read the ruling of the Second Court of Appeal in USA v Sergei Aleynikov here. A katpat goes to Amanda Harcourt for this link to "Code Not Physical Property, Court Rules in Goldman Sachs Espionage Case", Wired.

The nearest that the IPKat
is ever likely to get
to changing the world 

Here, there and everywhere. There has been a recent boom in English-language titles that address intellectual property law and practice in jurisdictions from which current and good-quality information has often been hard to come by. In particular the IPKat notices the following:three new stand-alone carve-outs from the Kluwer International Encyclopaedia of Laws which have recently been issued for Sweden, Switzerland and Vietnam.  Somewhat alarmingly, a search of the Wolters Kluwer Law & Business website (WKL&B being the publisher) did not reveal search results for any of the authors: Li Westerlund (Sweden), the IPKat's friend François Dessemontet (Switzerland) and Le Net plus Helen Alexandra Morris (Vietnam) -- though all three show up on the website of the publisher's Aspen imprint. Katnote to Wolters Kluwer: ever since the internet was invented, your website has been a real pain to navigate and is on a par with that of Sweet & Maxwell for sheer awfulness.  Speak to your site visitors, listen to what they want and need, then implement it, as many of your competitors already do.  For the record, you can check these titles out here (for Sweden), here (Switzerland) and here (Vietnam).

Local IP practitioners are not
lacking in self-confidence ...

Modesty forbids this Kat from making comments on the latest IP tome from Oxford University Press, this being Intellectual Property Law and Practice in Israel by Eran Liss and Dan Adin. It's nearly 700 pages long and is replete with citations of Israel's eclectic and frequently eccentric case law (precedents are routinely borrowed from other jurisdictions, while some home-grown case law is a bit less popular).  The local IP profession is larger-than-life, highly competitive, often quite hyperactive and full of experts who disagree quite vocally with one other. Now you can read this book and be an expert too.  Good news for readers is that the text reads from left to right .  The book's web page is here.

Fun-fare for the
Common Man?

 Indian tapestry of IP. The IPKat has learned of a new title which, he is bound to say, he has not yet sampled.  Its author, Kalyan C. Kankanala, tells him

"I am happy to inform you that we have published a short ebook on IP, entitled, FUN IP (Fundamentals of Intellectual Property). The book is intended to make IP Learning fun and enjoyable for one and all. It gives a primer on IP converging the interests of creators, businesses, government and the common man. In addition to basic concepts, it expounds various contemporary issues and debates in today's business environment. In summary, the book narrates the IP story of India by weaving together background information, concepts, cases, experiences and public perception. The story is told by an IP professional through the eyes of a person with ordinary skill".

Readers who like weaving, or who just want to sample this ebook, can do so by visiting Dr K's website here.

Around the weblogs. It's a little strange to think that the European Commission and Google might have much to agree about, but when it comes to openness and the internet they do have some common ground, reports Eleonora Rosati on the 1709 Blog here. On The SPC Blog, Katarzyna Zbierska ("Atripla in Poland: a recent ruling on "product" and claim construction") writes up another recent Polish decision in the difficult and technically complex topic of patent term extension. IP Tango's Patricia Covarrubia notes how South America's PROSUR is edging towards a regional trade mark registration system.