Friday fantasies

Goodbye August, hello September: that's when David Carson (General Counsel, US Copyright Office) metamorphoses from public servant to private sector policy panjandrum.  A long-term Londoner, this Kat looks forward to welcoming David to his native city where he will assume the role of head of global legal policy at the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI). Good luck, David, says the Kat -- who has a friend or two at IFPI and has enjoyed more than one or two cups of coffee there in his time -- and enjoy yourself in Piccadilly.

A little inattentive, Merpel was
certain that the PCC was
introducing a small train track

And what about October?  That's when the good folk of England and Wales were promised a brand-new small claims track in the now incredibly impressive and popular Patents County Court from October, is happening?  Neither the IPKat nor Merpel have heard anything about this for ages.  The Kats wonder whether there has been a serious re-think about the sort of resources that would be needed to staff and diminish an IP small claims court, given the potential for flooding it from Day One with a multitude of claims from disgruntled copyright owners who have spent the past decade being told that the cost of even minimal legal representation would set them back by a larger amount than they could ever recoup if they succeeded in an action for damages.  There must be someone out there who does know what is happening, surely, they mew ...

Never mind the Olympic flame, what about the Digital Spark!  As the IPKat may have mentioned a month or two ago, Digital Spark is being rekindled next week, on 5-6 September 2012.  This conference, which addresses a broad range of IP and related topics for the Digital Creative Industries, is based on the premise that IP is a vital and dynamic aspect of those industries -- but that it should be viewed in a practical and joined-up manner with the commercial and technical context in which it is used in these industries. The event is run by the University of Abertay, Dundee ("The UK's first national centre for excellence in computer games education"). It's almost too late to register, but not quite: further details and registration here.

Around the weblogs. The furious litigation between Anheuser-Busch and Budejovicky Budvar over the right to use the terms BUD and BUDWEISER as trade marks may have abated, but AB is obviously finding it hard both to kick the litigation habit and to do it properly. In the horribly-named but very readable Los Angeles Intellectual Property Trademark Attorney Blog the splendidly-named Milord A. Keshishian writes on a spat over a bow-tie which has left the cold beer men in hot water [it took this Kat about three tries to work out what AB was up to ...]. A katpat, incidentally, goes to Alice Gould for providing the link.  Elsewhere, the jiplp weblog picks up a story from IP Draughts about the BlaBlaMeter, Kingsley Egbuonu reports on Afro-IP that the condition of Cameroon's official IP websites has actually deteriorated in the past year, which is quite a feat when you consider how poor they were 12 months ago.  Finally the 1709 Blog's commentary on Danuta Kean's advice on how individual authors and copyright owners can fight back against online pirates has attracted a good deal of comment of its own.