Wednesday whimsies

The best IP judgment that has never been written. Those great purveyors of fun over the past 500 years at Oxford University Press have really surpassed themselves this time.  As publishers of the Journal of Intellectual Property Law & Practice (JIPLP) the Press is running a summer competition of which the full details appear on JIPLP's official website --  as well as here.  What is required, in short, is

... a short piece of writing explaining who you are (contributor, board member, subscriber etc) and what you think is the best IP judgment that has never been written.  The winning entry will receive £250 of OUP books and a year's free personal sub to JIPLP and the runner-up will receive £100 worth of OUP books. Entries will be judged on how entertainingly written and engaging they are and, the extent to which they draw on actual examples of content from intellectual property writing. Entries should be between 500-600 words, and be submitted by 30 September 2012. The winning entries will be announced on 3 December. All entries are to be submitted to Christopher.wogan@oup.com

The winning entry will be posted on the jiplp weblog (subject to the usual laws of defamation, obscenity and, if relevant, copyright ...).  Do have a go!

Great Ormond Street in the bad old days,
when everything was still in black and white ...

News that the British government plans to push ahead in exploiting the brand potential of some of the National Health Service's leading hospitals has attracted a good deal of criticism, both from those who oppose it on ideological grounds and from the opposition Labour Party, whose idea it originally was. Moorfields Eye Hospital and the Great Ormond Street Children's Hospital are among the obvious brand leaders in the NHS portfolio: Moorfields already trades in the Middle East, while Great Ormond Street's fund-raising power, allied to its income from the sui generis Peter Pan right, reflects the organisation's great financial clout even in times of recession.  This Kat thinks the idea of turning good hospitals into chains or medical service format franchises is great: if health services can be delivered at a high standard, then packaged and licensed out or transferred to other locations, and marketed to communities in need of those services, who would lose out?  This is just the sort of thing that good IP practices can underpin and assist.  Merpel notes that this already happens in the field of veterinary medicine, where Medivet, an animal care practice founded in 1986, now has some 90 branches in the UK and has established itself as a leading brand.

The IPKat has learned, to his consternation, that the Bulgarian government has been preparing a draft Law of the Chamber of the Industrial Property Аgents. According to his friend Sabina Vankova (Attorney-At-Law, Vankova & Partners, Sofia),the new law is likely to cause legal problems of its own by imposing restrictions on foreign IP agents and IP Lawyers which are in breach of EU law. A letter from the local profession to the Bulgarian Patent Office, the Supreme Bar Council, the Sofia Bar Association, the British Embassy in Bulgaria and the British Bulgarian Chamber of Commerce states, in part:

"In conclusion, we think that the Draft Act should be amended by:

* cancelling the provision according to which foreign representatives must take an examination for a representative in the field of patents, utility models and/or brands in industrial designs and geographical indications, subject to Art. 8 of the Draft Act;

* cancelling the provision according to which foreign representatives, who wish to practise their profession in the Republic of Bulgaria, must submit an application to the Chairperson of the Chamber for registration of foreign representatives practising their profession in the Republic of Bulgaria.

The amendments above are necessary to avoid the accusation that Bulgaria is not bringing our legislation in line with the EU legislation".

You can read the letter in full, in the original Bulgarian and in English translation, here.  If you'd like to add your voice to that of those who seek to amend the Bill, just email the Bulgarian Patent Office at bpo@bpo.bg or email the Office's Magdalena Radulova at mradulova@bpo.bg.

London's original Glass House was the Crystal
Palace -- much admired by many, though others
thought it was a bit of a pane ...

Around the weblogs. The past few days have been a quiet time in this Kat's corner of the Blogosphere, but Afro-IP's Kingsley Egbuonu has been as active as ever, first revisiting the official IP presence of Burundi -- only to find that it has vanished since last he was there -- and then reporting on South Korea's increasing support for ICT projects in Angola, South Africa and Rwanda.  On the 1709 Blog Iona Harding updates her earlier piece on programme format protection and The Glass House.  On Class 46, former Kat and good friend Mark Schweizer brings news that another brick has been dislodged from the IP wall with which Lego once protected its popular product -- this being the loss of its three-dimensional trade mark in Switzerland.  Finally on the IP Finance weblog fellow Kat Neil J. Wilkof turns to address an issue which many may have felt obsolete in an era in which one-patent-per-product is so rarely in evidence, asking whether -- from an investment standpoint -- it's better for a start-up business to focus on pinning down its patent rights or to develop a plausible prototype, here.