Monday miscellany

Who says you can't make money out of copyright? Authors, composers and publishers may all be feeling the pinch, but at least you can get a salary for doing some useful copyright research. There's a neat little opportunity going at the University of Nottingham for a suitably CREATe-ive soul who can earn in an entire year what Barcelona soccer star Lionel Messi earns in less than half a day: details here.



Another remunerative-ish prospect, though definitely one which is unlikely to tempt Lionel Messi, is the prospect of revising the Intellectual Property chapter of the Company Secretary’s Factbook. Previous IP enthusiasts who have fulfilled this role are this Kat and, more recently, his good friend Ruth Soetendorp.  According to Eva Senior (Development Editor, Finance and Business CCH, a Wolters Kluwer enterprise):

"The Company Secretary’s Factbook is a complete information and support service for company secretaries, providing everything a company secretary needs to perform their duties and to fully comply with the law. It offers a single source of reference on every possible issue including the duties of a company secretary, company law, contract law, employment law, environmental law, facilities management, property and planning law, company accounts, Companies Act checklist, taxation, insurance, and company law forms. Fully indexed and cross referenced, the product is current with its five updates per year, detailed and easy to use. The chapter was last revised in April 2012 and is in need of updating. We offer a fee of £500 plus VAT for the initial rewrite and would need an updated copy by 02 January 2013". 

Eva is happy to forward the material to any serious and suitably qualified candidate for inspection and could also set up an online access to the whole product. You can call her to discuss this proposal on +44 (0)20 8247 1571 or email her here.

Around the weblogs. This Kat fended off the kind offer of a post from veteran Canadian blogger Howard Knopf on the Tale of Tobermory (right) after he spotted that one of his fellow Kats had already started to compose a post on the same subject.  Well, this Kat is still waiting -- but you don't have to, since Howard's post, on Excess Copyright, can be found here, immediately under a later post about Apple being in a pickle of which this good man is modestly proud.  Elsewhere, both IP Finance (here) and PatLit (here) bear news of this Kat's friend Campbell Forsyth's involvement in HLP3, a new initiative to make patent infringement litigation more money-friendly for small and medium-sized patent owners.  If you are sufficiently interested in design protection law to follow the Class 99 weblog, you cannot have failed to notice an unparalleled degree of hyperactivity from that source, with blogmeister David Musker contributing a massive seven posts of the eight added today.

After what seems an age, this Kat is pleased to have heard again from his old friend and one-time IP blogger Miri Frankel, who has just earned herself a katpat for this news of a somewhat scary attempt by New York's Village Voice Media to mark out its territory by claiming exclusive rights to the use of the words "Best Of". If the IPKat should ever dare to form an opinion concerning this dispute, he would find it hard to resist the temptation to think that this was just the sort of thing that gives intellectual property a bad name within the world at large.