Wednesday whimsies

Today's the day of the IPKat's annual Intellectual Property Publishers and Editors lunch, kindly hosted by Simmons & Simmons in its CityPoint office, London.  Some 70 people have registered to attend, which makes it the biggest meeting yet, and the Kat promises to report on it when the opportunity arises.  Keynote speaker is Michael Harrison (Harrison IP), who now edits the Chartered Institute of Patent Attorneys' CIPA Journal. We are pleased to welcome friends and colleagues from several countries to what should be a special occasion.

Around the weblogs. From Afro-Leo, posting on Afro-IP, come some thoughts on the relevance of international IP developments to a jurisdiction such as South Africa.  Art & Artifice has been busy recently, with more on the story of Cecilia Gimenez's now famous "Monkey Boy" restoration of the Ecce Home painting in her local church, as well as two pieces here and here on the sale by the London Borough of Tower Hamlets of two popular and high-profile sculptures.  Meanwhile the 1709 Blog hosts two pieces by authors from the sunnier parts of Europe. The first is an analysis by Antonella Barbieri and Federica De Santis of the developments in Italy leading up to and then beyond the CJEU's ruling in the Flos Arco lamp case; the second is an appraisal by Fidel Porcuna of the latest Spanish mechanism for dealing with fair compensation for private copying in the wake of the CJEU's ruling in Padawan.

Don't know where Palau is? How silly of you! As everyone knows, it's a place on the internet which has its own country code top-level domain of .pw (which, as every kat knows, is "paw", but without the "a"). Next month sees the relaunch of the .pw domain, not so much as a nod to the existence of the small island nation that is the Republic of Palau but rather as a cynically commercial exercise to exploit the convenient fact that "pw" is also an abbreviation of "professional web" (a katpat to Lexsynergy for this information).