Friday fantasies

Famous folk. This Kat learns that this year’s inductees into the IP Hall of Fame have now been selected. They are

• Daniel Bereskin (a founding partner of Canadian law firm Bereskin & Parr and a past recipient of the INTA President's Award for his long-standing service to the organisation)
• Thierry Sueur (vice president of intellectual property at Air Liquide, chairman of the IP committee of French business federation MEDEF and chairman of the Patent Working Committee of Business Europe)
• Heinz Goddar (partner at German firm Boehmert & Boehmert, a teacher of IP at universities around the world and a past president of LES International)
• Gary Griswold (former head of 3M’s global IP operations and a past president of both the American Intellectual Property Law Association and the Intellectual Property Owners Association)
• Mark Lemley (professor of law at Stanford Law and a widely-cited source of patent and antitrust legal and policy expertise). 

As one of the Hall of Fame panel of judges this Kat can testify that, in addition to this year's inductees, there some jolly good people on the list of nominees, many of whom are highly likely to make it to the Hall of Fame during their lifetimes or shortly thereafter. He congratulates this year's new boys and comments that we are fortunate that our IP community is served by so many dedicated enthusiasts.

Praised be the IPO!  The UK Intellectual Property Office (IPO) IP Equip training tool attracted the attention of the IP Finance blog when it was launched as "a new, free interactive online training tool that helps businesses and their advisors to identify assets which may be protected by IP rights and think through the strategy for protecting them".  At that point, IP Finance commented, on IP Equip and the other initiatives announced together with it:

"While no-one can accuse the IPO of not trying, it would be good to know how effective these tools are: how far have they been test-driven and how widely applicable are they?" 

Well, we have some very positive evidence that IP Equip is performing impressively well. As the IPO reports:

“The CPD Certification Service has assessed the IP Equip Course and wishes to congratulate the IPO on how it has applied the technology that delivers the course content. The Service reviews many e-learning course a week and is always grateful to its members when they exhibit what the Service calls "best practice" when designing such courses. The innovative manner in which the question and answer sessions are delivered is such a superb example of that best practice. Our assessments team was delighted to review what is one of the best well thought out and executed courses it has ever seen”. 

Well done, IPO! Keep up the good work, says the IPKat.  But what about the IPO's other IP for Business tools, asks Merpel ...


Subtle change ahead. From Graham Titley (Katpat!) comes a reminder that this Sunday, 6 April, is not just the first day of the new tax year for British taxpayers but also the date on which changes to Rule 19 of the Patents Rules come into force. The Rules in question are the Patents (Amendment) Rules 2014 SI 2014 578. There has been some discussion as to whether this amendment actually changes anything [on which see earlier Katpost here] but, according to para 4.4 of the Explanatory Memorandum,

The new instrument corrects an error in rule 19 of the 2007 Rules. In error, rule 19 fails to set different time periods for filing a divisional application by reference to whether the associated earlier application had to be examined once or more than once to determine that it met the requirements of the Act for the grant of a patent. 

Around the weblogs.  Professor Dr Winfried Tilmann is no stranger to the IPKat weblog. Nor now is he a stranger to PatLit, where he has guested a thorough and detailed critique of some of the legal dimensions to those issues which, even after sixteen drafts, the Rules of Procedure of the Unified Patent Court Agreement have left open.  Elsewhere, Ben Challis has parodied Eleonora's "Copyright + Online Enforcement = Happiness?" event title as "The CopyKat + Inspiration = Happiness" (naughty, Ben, but nice ...) in his most recent round-up of copyright issues on the 1709 Blog.  Over in Canada, Katfriend Howard Knopf (Excess Copyright) takes time off from patrolling his usual territory of copyright law, reporting on the impending death of the excess Canadian hyphen -- the one that has blighted the spelling of "trade mark" or "trademark" as "trade-mark", as you can discover by reading here. Finally, on Afro-IP, Caroline NCube touches on the troubles of Eritrea, which not only has no national IP policy but has even withdrawn its soccer team from the African Cup of Nations 2015.

Fancy an Information Influx? Come to De Rode Hoed! From 2 to 4 July 2014 the Institute for Information Law at the University of Amsterdam (IViR) is organising a conference, Information Influx, to discuss the future of information law in the 21st century. Information Influx kicks off with a workshop for young scholars and a grand opening in the University Aula for conference participants, the media and the general public. For the next two days, Information Influx will convene in De Rode Hoed (right) to explore societally and economically relevant themes such as open access, digitization, creativity, media diversity, internet censorship, cybersecurity, news, pervasive profiling and privacy in public in a series of seminars, panels, as well as presentations. All the details, and more, can be found by clicking here.  There's also a call for papers for the young scholars workshop which takes place during the conference, the details of which you can access here.