Thursday thingies

The only island most cats consider
visiting is the Isle of Man --  but
that's another tail ...

Map Paradise Project. The IPKat’s old friend Ann Critchell-Ward (once a serious IP private practitioner but now with TomTom) has written to tell him that her company is launching a competition which, she thinks, may appeal to kats and/or readers. She explains:

We have just launched our Map Paradise Project in which we will give five families or groups of friends a once-in-a lifetime opportunity to spend two weeks on a tropical island and earn 10,000 euros for mapping it.

The plan is to send five lucky groups on a fantastic experience and, in the process, create new navigable maps for: Fiji, St. Lucia, Mauritius, Cape Verde, and the Seychelles. The Project lasts 10 weeks and a successful group will be selected every two weeks. It’s really easy and straightforward for people to apply at www.tomtom.com/summer.

It’s just a brand promotion [as if we haven’t guessed, snorts Merpel, who can’t be tempted from her shady spot in the garden by the thought of flying off to Shangri-La if it means having to go through airport security again] and doesn’t have any hidden catches -- but it would be fabulous if an IP enthusiast won! Would it be possible for you to put the word out on the IPKat?

Good luck, dear readers, and when you get there be sure to file a report on IP enforcement for us …

The Observatory and the Kat's survey. Last month the Official Journal of the European Union published Regulation 386/2012 on entrusting the Office for Harmonization in the Internal Market (Trade Marks and Designs) with tasks related to the enforcement of intellectual property rights, including the assembling of public and private-sector representatives as a European Observatory on Infringements of Intellectual Property Rights. This Kat commented that the European Commission had high hopes that this would provide badly-needed support for legitimate businesses in the EU in their perpetual and frustrating quest to get the upper hand over IP infringers. While this Kat fervently hoped that he will be proved wrong, he had doubts that it would achieve this noble objective and, wondering whether his doubts were shared by others, he conducted a poll of blog readers, asking them torate the EU's IP Enforcement Observatory.

Though the scale of the voting was regrettably low (only 92 responses were received), their flavour is indicative of the fact that substantial doubt, if not downright hostility, is felt by a significant body of respondents. Responses were as follows (the figures given here are percentages):

• It's a great idea to get the EU institutionally involved 8
• It all depends on what it observes, and how it reacts 23
• We should keep an open mind and see how it gets on 14
• It's hard to see how it can help IP owners enforce their IP 18
• It's a complete waste of time and money 37

This leads the Kat to ponder why the European Union didn’t opt for something more closely akin to the apparently popular and useful United States institution of the Intellectual Property Enforcement Coordinator. But Merpel says, if the US does it one way and Europe does it another, we can at least measure the functional utility and the cost-effectiveness of each against the other.

A long-time follower of the IPKat
weblog, Her Majesty chuckles at
the latest bon mot from Merpel ...

No royalties for Royalty celebrations. This Kat was too slow to report ahead of time that PRS for Music, the collecting society responsible for administering royalties for the use of musical works in the United Kingdom, announced that it would not charge licence fees for the playing of music at certain community events held to celebrate the Queen's Diamond Jubilee 2012. This exemption ran from 2 to 5 June 2012 and applied to non-profit-making events, such as street parties, intended for up to 300 people. Together with his apology, the Kat comes up with a bright idea: bearing in mind the fact that the Royal Family in the UK is remarkably long-lived, diarise the Queen’s Platinum Anniversary, which should be celebrated in the first week of June 2022, and remember to check the PRS website well in advance to be sure of applying in time for your free licence [Merpel wonders whether, in the light of the displeasure which the PRS and many other collecting societies – i.e. the ones that work – incurs from the European Commission, there will be a PRS website in 2022. Perhaps it will have been replaced by a recorded message consisting of the EU competition rules …].


Around the weblogs. Though it’s not an IP publication as such, the Australian Club Troppo blog contains all sorts of things to interest the curious mind, not least of which is “‘With friends like this’: Labor policies and the commercial, independent visual arts sector”, a pretty hefty post by the IPKat’s friends, avid 1709 Blog readers Ann Sanders and John Walker on the impact of resale royalty rights on community of artists from which they come. On the 1709 Blog “Getting Paid is a Moral Right, too! Why Creative Commons Gets it Wrong”, the third in Mira T. Sundara Rajan’s series on moral rights, has attracted a good deal of controversy; you can read it here. Over on the MARQUES Class 46 Blog Hanne Weywardt tells of a recent Danish trade mark infringement ruling which gives us a good view of the Danish take on the calculation of damages following implementation of the EU’s Directive 2004/48 (the IP Enforcement Directive).