Friday Fantasies

He thought he ate a fishball,
but it was by Damien Hirst --
and the formaldehyde
tasted dreadful ...

This week's big event in the IPKat's diary was the IP Publishers and Editors lunch, at which a record crowd was treated to the pleasures of a delightful lunch, a view of Simmons & Simmons' art collection (think Damien Hirst and Tracey Emin) and themed display on social exclusion.  The highlight of the occasion was a most amusing speech by new CIPA Journal editor Michael Harrison in which he summarised his publishing credentials (which, presumably, were unknown to the appointment committee when it offered him the editorial job) and displayed the sort of mastery of English prose which we have all come to expect from people who earn their living by drafting patent claims.  Entertainment was also provided by the ever-modest and indeed retiring Tibor Gold seeking to hide his head beneath his jacket each time he was publicly (and deservedly) praised for making the CIPA Journal what it is today, and by the confession by the host firm's David Stone that he found it "quite an effort" to produce a tome on design law of nearly quarter of a million words in a mere nine months [Merpel reckons it would take her longer than that to read it].  The IPKat and his friends are already looking forward to next year's event, for which they seek generous offers of hospitality and nominations for the 2013 keynote speaker.

A trilogy of Kats: L to R,
Eleonora, Catherine and Kate

Katnote: the lunch was a sort of historical moment for the IPKat team. Five of the blogging crew attended the event and it was the first time that any of the four who were not Jeremy had met each other.  It's strange to think how your humble feline servants occupy a slice of world in which the virtual becomes the real and the social media provide our point of contact: we exchange circulars, encourage and support one another, sometimes correct or even rewrite each other's copy, tempt each other with links to items we can't write for ourselves, and generally operate as a fairly efficient team, without having previously had much chance to share each other's company.

"Opus Dei sues over card game" is the striking title of a short piece that appeared yesterday on the website of The Scotsman, here. According to the story, reproduced here in relevant part:

"Opus Dei, the powerful organisation within the Catholic Church, is suing a Danish 
publisher for alleged trademark violations involving a card game titled “Opus Dei: Existence After Religion” ...

The game is the brainchild of philosophy student Mark Rees-Andersen, 28, who launched it in 2009.

Opus Dei is demanding that the game’s trademark registration in the country be deleted. It is also seeking financial compensation and closure of the website where the game is on sale ....

Opus Dei spokeswoman 
Joanna Engstedt said that Dema Games has no right to use her 
organisation’s name, which means “work of God” in Latin".

The IPKat will be keeping an eye on developments.  Merpel notes that the relief demanded by Opus Dei extends only to this world and not the next.

There's not much that can beat the sheer
thrill of a well-attended event ...

Event reminders.  The IPKat's friends at IBC are all looking forward to the annual International Patent Litigation Conference on 11 December: there's a solid programme, a good cast and a generous discount for IPKat readers who register for it (details here).  The JIPLP-GRUR Int inaugural seminar in London on Secondary Protection for Innovations on 22 January now has 45 registrants; details of the inaugural seminar in Munich on 6 March will be announced shortly.

Apparently she's a food
stylist, but this London-
born blogger keeps thinking
that 'Donna Hay' is a
piece of rhyming slang

Around the weblogs. There has been plenty of activity on the MARQUES Class 46 weblog this week. Most notably, Jean-François Vanden Eynde (eBrand Services) has been asking some unanswerable questions concerning the gTLD early warnings (on which guest Kat Robert posted this earlier today), while Jan Zecher (Fish & Richardson) has been making some highly pertinent observations concerning the status of mistakenly-accepted seniority claims which support Community trade mark applications based on earlier national marks.  Over in the world of copyright, the 1709 Blog's flow of guest talent continues unabated as Julian Gyngell (Kepdowrie Chambers) treats us to a frankly silly spat over the possibly coincidental and probably non-infringing conceptual similarity between two magazine covers.  Wilkinson v London Strategic Health Authority is an interesting decision on the entitlement to copyright in training materials which has been sitting for too long in the IPKat's in-tray -- but you can read about it now thanks to Mark Anderson's to-the-point dissection of the issues on IP Draughts. Finally, if you are one of those souls who has something sensible to say about patent term extension for pharmaceutical products, there's someone in Australia who is waiting to hear from you. Details from The SPC Blog here.